Here's an informative and creative article written by Noël Ramos, the founder of the IMC – Independent Music Conference.  The original story is posted on Facebook. The article notes some of the key moments in the development of music as a commercial business, and posits the question, could an alternate future have developed at any of these key moments to have changed music history?



Imagine There's No Labels
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Imagine there's no Labels
It's easy if you try
No contracts to hold us
Our limit is the sky
Imagine all the artists
Living to create

You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the industry will be as one

- with thanks to John Lennon

Has anyone here or elsewhere ever written anything wherein they postulate what might have been if the Record Labels had never come into existence?

It's 1877, Edison announced the phonograph, and the accompanying phonograph cylinder, or "phono-cylinder." Over the next 60-70 years the phono-cylinder would give birth to the major record label industry, but what if another type of market had sprung up instead? What other possible business models might have taken root, and allowed musicians to record and sell their compositions and performances?

It's interesting to note, that in the earliest days of the market, mass-production was only possible on a rudimentary scale. Only about 25 copies of a phono-cylinder could be made by playing one into another machine. After a small number of duplicates were recorded from the original cylinder, the grooves degraded, and so artists had to perform, and perform, and perform again, sometimes hundreds or thousands of times, to supply consumer demand. That means many cylinders were unique from one another in that they were a record of the same song, but an entirely different performance.

The first major African-American recording star, George Washington Johnson had to perform “The Laughing Song” literally thousands of times in a studio during his recording career. Sometimes he would sing his hit song more than fifty times in a day, at twenty cents per rendition. The average price of a single cylinder in the mid-1890s was about fifty cents. By 1895, Johnson's two tunes "The Whistling Coon" and "The Laughing Song" were the best-selling recordings in the United States. The total sales of his wax cylinders between 1890 and 1895 have been estimated at 25,000 to 50,000, each one recorded individually by Johnson.

In 1892 Emile Berliner began commercial production of disc records, and "gramophones" or "talking-machines." His "gramophone record" was the first disc record to be offered to the public, and thus began the industry's very first format war. The phono-discs were five inches in diameter and recorded on one side only. Seven-inch discs followed in 1895. Berliner's early records had poor sound quality, but later Eldridge R. Johnson improved the sound fidelity to a point where it was as good as the cylinder. By 1901, ten-inch records were marketed by Johnson and Berliner's new merger, the Victor Talking Machine Company. Victor may sound familiar, and you're correct, it would eventually become RCA Records.

Another interesting note is that the record business faced near-extinction early on. The 1920s brought improved radio technology and radio sales, bringing many phonograph dealers to near financial ruin. After great efforts to improve audio fidelity, the big record companies succeeded in maintaining their business through the end of the decade, but then record sales plummeted during the Great Depression. Many companies merged, or went out of business.

Sound familiar?

One last interesting tidbit regarding the production of phono-discs as opposed to cylinders... A novelty variation on the standard format was the use of multiple concentric spirals with different recordings. That way, when the record was played multiple times, different recordings would play at random. That's one cool little marketing idea that I never had the pleasure of experiencing firsthand.

Perhaps in order to ponder on what might have been, we need to go back even further in musical history, and examine briefly, the very beginnings of the modern music industry. It might be said that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a pioneer of what we now call the music business.

Until the 18th century, the processes of formal composition and of the printing of music took place for the most part with the support of patronage from aristocracies and churches. In the mid-to-late 18th century, performers and composers such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart began to seek commercial opportunities to market their music and performances to the general public.

From 1782 to 1785, seeking to expand beyond the confines of church and court, and find new, more commercial sources of revenue, he mounted concerts with himself as soloist, presenting three or four new piano concertos in each season. Since space in the theaters was scarce, he booked unconventional venues: a large room in the Trattnerhof (an apartment building), and the ballroom of the Mehlgrube (a restaurant). The concerts were very popular, Vanguard Records founder and musicologist, Maynard Solomon writes that during this period Mozart created "a harmonious connection between an eager composer-performer and a delighted audience, which was given the opportunity of witnessing the transformation and perfection of a major musical genre."

This direct connection with his fans, and the unconventional ways he found to market and perform his music, may qualify Mozart as the very first "indie." With substantial returns from his concerts and elsewhere, he and his wife Constanze adopted a rather plush lifestyle. Eventually, in 1787 Mozart "got signed" and obtained a steady post under aristocratic patronage. Emperor Joseph II appointed him as his "chamber composer." After Mozart's death, his wife Constanze continued marketing his music and image for financial gain. Her business skills proved impressive, as she obtained a pension from the Emperor, organized profitable memorial concerts, and embarked on a campaign to publish her husband's works. These efforts made Constanze financially secure, and perhaps even wealthy. She sent her sons to Prague to be educated by Franz Xaver Niemetschek, with whom she collaborated on the first full-length biography of Mozart.

Was the enterprise created by Constanze a precursor to the "record company?"

In the United States, as we entered the 19th Century, music publishers and songwriters dominated the popular music of the time. When a number of music publishers set up shop in the same district of Manhattan, it became known as Tin Pan Alley. Said to have been named that because of the noisiness in the area created by the thin, tinny tone quality of cheap upright pianos being played simultaneously in many music publisher's offices, Tin Pan Alley ruled the music business of the era. Eventually the nickname came to describe the whole U.S. music industry in general.

Interestingly enough, the main consumers targeted by Tin Pan Alley were not professional musicians! Their efforts were oriented towards producing songs that amateur singers or small town bands could perform from printed music. Quite the contrast to the highly professional status of today's music superstars. Although the beginnings of Tin Pan Alley can be pinpointed at around 1885, the end of their reign is less clear cut. Some say Tin Pan Alley wound down at the start of the Great Depression in the 1930s when the phonograph and radio supplanted sheet music as the driving force of American popular music. Others believe it continued into the 1950s when earlier styles of American popular music were upstaged by the rise of rock & roll.

During their heyday the music houses in lower Manhattan were hectic places, with a constant stream of songwriters, vaudeville and Broadway performers, musicians, and "song pluggers" coming and going. Aspiring songwriters came to demonstrate tunes they hoped to sell. Established producers of successful songs were hired as staff writers by the music houses. The most successful of them, like Harry Von Tilzer and Irving Berlin, went on to found their own publishing firms. "Song pluggers" were pianists and singers who made their living demonstrating songs to promote sales of sheet music. Most music stores had song pluggers on staff. Other pluggers were employed by the publishers to travel and familiarize the public with their new tunes. One such song plugger was a 15 year old George Gershwin. When vaudeville performers played New York City, they would visit various Tin Pan Alley firms to find new songs for their acts. Lesser known performers often paid for rights to use a new song, while famous stars were given free copies of new numbers or were paid to perform them, because the publishers knew it was valuable advertising.

Tin Pan Alley music houses formed associations, and attempted to lobby the government for legislative change that would benefit their businesses. One such association, The American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) which was founded in 1914, is still active and widely recognized today.

Did the business model created by the "music houses" of Tin Pan Alley steer the industry toward the creation of "Record Labels" as phono-cylinders started to become widely popular?

Looking at any of the "jumping off points" briefly described in this article, can you theorize an alternative universe, a divergent time-line in which a different business model took hold?

What might that industry be like?