Changes in the Music Industry over the Last 50 Years

How the Tune Changes – 50 Years of Music in Retrospect
by George A. Miu

The year is 1960. The Beatles are playing in some dodgy Hamburg nightclub without a clue of their impending worldwide success. Elvis is off making dreadful movies in Hollywood. Buddy Holly is not yet cold in his grave. Vietnam hasn’t started. The Summer of Love is unthinkable at this point.

The year is 2010. The Beatles are still selling million of records, even though they haven’t played a show in more than 40 years. The anniversary of Buddy’s passing still brings out mourners each year. Even Elvis’s movies are loved (which is a remarkable thing, indeed). And the music industry grosses billions upon billions of dollars – kids from LA to Vladivostok are singing Ke$ha’s new song, or googling Eminem. What in the world happened in this last half-century to catalyze such a shift in the importance of music?

Well, for starters, musicians upped the ante. The Beatles broke up in 1970; they played their last concert in 1966. History thus tells us that one of the greatest bands of all time did not perform live for over a third of its immensely productive career. I mean – Vanilla Ice still goes on tour with the same tired song time and again; why couldn’t the Beatles get it together on stage? Anyway – the point here is that, by playing more shows and doing a tour with every new album, modern artists enter the public consciousness a lot more easily.

Also, artists are increasingly built to target a specific audience; for example – Justin Bieber for the tweens, Michael Bublé for the modern Sinatra-lovers and the late, great Johnny Cash for the all-around hard-assed. They then cross-over into general audiences, but always have a specific fanbase, as opposed to the more willy-nilly marketing tactics of ages past.

Similarly, people are more responsive to music. Cliques begin forming around artistic tastes more than anything, and this, in turn, spreads the appeal of various genres to perceptive by-standers.

These three factors weighed in heavily from the 70’s onwards, and created memorable musical movements whose impact is still widely felt today. It also set the stage for technology to come to the rescue – from iPods to iTunes, music is now easy to obtain and to listen to. No more mammoth gramophones, bulky walkmen and chunky CD players. A laptop and small portable device are all you need to access pretty much all the music anyone would ever want.

All of these developments, and many more, contributed to the radical transformation that the music industry has undergone in the past fifty years. I have to wonder, now – what will the next five decades bring?