Media, Technology, and the African American Music Business

The eruption of rock ‘n’ roll in the mid-1950s encouraged a tilt toward African American cultural sensibilities and performance styles, as numerous African American artists “crossed over” into mainstream culture. While Tin Pan Alley recordings favored bland performances and production values, rock ‘n’ roll incorporated the capabilities of the technology into the creative process itself, using echo, editing, overdubbing, and other technical effects to distort or enhance the live performance.

As this relationship deepened in the 1960s, it served to separate Black artists from white rockers. Black music was built around the hit single, at a time when white rockers had begun promoting extended compositions, psychedelic influences, and concept albums. Rock artists now labored over every cut in the studio, experimenting with new sounds, adding special effects, and layering, multitracking, overdubbing, crossfading, and mixing to perfection. A whole new radio medium—FM rock radio—opened up to accommodate these new sounds. Only a few Black acts—notably, Sly and the Family Stone and the Jimi Hendrix Experience—found a ready home on FM rock radio. By the early 1970s, about 80 percent of each sales dollar was in albums, and album-oriented rockers with more access to the new medium were much more likely to reap the benefits.

Throughout this period, the televised dance party American Bandstand provided national exposure for rock ‘n’ roll stars, Black and white, who also made regular appearances on family variety shows like the Ed Sullivan Show. Into the 1960s, shows like Shindig and Hullabaloo also provided some exposure to African American artists. Soul Train, the brainchild of writer, producer, and host Don Cornelius, debuted in 1970 as a Black variation of Bandstand in Chicago. One year later it went into national syndication. By 2005, it had become television’s longest running show in first-run syndication, with 1.25 million viewers in 105 markets. The Soul Train archives have become a veritable treasure trove of African American cultural history.

By the 1980s, technological advances had brought into being the most powerful music promotion outlet ever—MTV. Initially, its programming brought acts of racial exclusion to new heights. Fully two years after its launch, People magazine reported that “on MTV’s current roster of some 800 acts, 16 are Black.” New music video outlets formed in reaction to MTV’s restrictive programming policies. Black Entertainment Television (BET) and the longstanding Soul Train provided the primary video exposure for Black talent in the early 1980s.

It wasn’t until videos accompanying Michael Jackson’s Thriller (1982) broke the color line on MTV that the video music channel began airing African American artists with any regularity. MTV began programming hip-hop around 1987. Although at first buried in a late-night weekend slot, Yo! MTV Raps soon moved to a daily afternoon schedule and became one of the channel’s most popular programs.

Hip-hop began in the 1970s as a South Bronx street culture comprising DJing, MCing (rapping), break-dancing, and graffiti art. In hip-hop, creative artists and consumers transformed existing tools of reproduction—notably, the turntable and the cassette deck—into productive technologies that served the creative process directly. Hip-hop DJs turned dual turntable rigs into full-fledged musical instruments through the use of techniques such as scratching and back-spinning. Double-cassette-deck boom-boxes became localized radio stations of the street, capable of recording, duplicating, and disseminating the music long before official recognition by the industry.

Early hip-hop DJs began their careers by hard-wiring their turntable rigs into power from the street lamps of public parks and soon moved into New York’s downtown club scene. MCs, initially part of a DJ’s crew for purposes of announcements and crowd control, began “rapping” their own spoken-word poetry over the DJ’s turntable gymnastics. The practice of superimposing spoken-word lyrics over a particular segment of an existing song provided the template for hip-hop recordings. In this way, “sampling” (incorporating segments of existing sound files into a recording), along with the construction of a rhythmic backing track, became integral parts of hip-hop production. Hip-hop production became ever more sophisticated and complex in the digital age with the introduction of digitally produced samples and percussion grooves and the addition of R&B-inflected vocals. The practice of sampling remained a staple of hip-hop, even as it became a legal minefield with respect to copyright violations, clearance issues, and licensing fees.

Even at the start of the new millennium, it was clear that the future of music would be tied to an online, interactive, digital environment. Rather than harness these new technologies, the corporate music industry chose to fight them. As a result, the international music industry lost more than 50% of its sales, with annual revenues plummeting from $38.5 billion in 1999 to $15.9 billion in 2010. African American personnel felt the pinch. As Billboard reported in a retrospective article on Black executives: “These changes left a sizable number of talented mid-level and higher promotion, marketing, A&R, and distribution executives on the street.”

Still, this development was not entirely bad news for African Americans in music. As early as 2000, the comprehensive Pew Internet and American Life project found that African Americans were more likely than whites to listen to music online and to download it from the Internet. And independent companies, where African Americans were more likely to be concentrated, would be better positioned, because they were more nimble and their audiences tended to be younger and more tech savvy.

In the age of the Internet, promotional vehicles like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, and streaming services such as Spotify, Pandora, and Apple Music, hold out the possibility of a more level playing field, where African Americans are as likely to find success as anyone else. In the end, perhaps all those African American artists and entrepreneurs who were downsized by the major labels in the name of profitability and economies of scale will have the last laugh by finding a comfortable and lucrative home in the digital world.