A music industry that has grown complacent. A radical new technology that threatens the status quo. Financial crises. Years of heated resistance and legal posturing.
Sound familiar? It should — to your great-grandfather. It's what happened back in the 1920s when the record industry first faced off against a new cutting-edge medium: Radio.
"The music industry was very afraid of radio in the '20s," says Rob Bowman, Grammy-winning music historian and professor of ethnomusicology at Toronto's York University.
"If you look at 78s from that period, they often have printed on the label, 'Not licensed for radio play.' Radio was an eminently superior medium, and the music industry thought radio was simply giving away their product — 'Why would people every buy 78s if they could hear them all day for free?' was the line of reasoning."
It took nearly 20 years for the record industry to come around, he says.
"The first radio station was licensed in 1920. Radio exploded in 1922. But I think it was 1939 or '40 before you started to have shows like Your Hit Parade, where you had disc jockeys playing records. Originally, they had bands playing the hit songs (live) in the studio, because they weren't allowed to play records. But eventually, record companies began to allow radio stations to play those hits — and saw increased revenue as a result.
But it took them two decades to learn that."
Like a stuck 78, history has kept repeating for the record industry, which rarely responds well to technological change.
"If you look back at the history of selling records, tapes and CDs from the 1890s to the present, you'll see waves of incredible expansion and then troughs of crisis."
And of course, it's happening now as the music industry struggles to deal with the paradigm shift posed by the Internet.
"I look at the Internet now in the same way as radio in the '20s," Bowman says. "But (the record labels) are too afraid to turn, in some ways. You get people who are entrenched in a particular business model. So when there's a paradigm shift like we're seeing, and it means that dozens of your employees — and maybe even you ‹ are going to become redundant, you're probably going to try and fight that. That's a natural instinct.
"It's easy to say, 'What a bunch of idiots, they should have seen this coming and they should have done that.' And yes, all of that's probably true. But it's not surprising. It's unfortunate, but not surprising."
The record companies might do well to absorb at least one lesson from the days of 78s and radio.
"A lot of those companies that were around back then don't exist anymore," Bowman says.
