The Fairlight CMI (computer musical instrument), released in 1979 (at $25,000), had a keyboard and monitor interface and could record and play back any sound. One prepackaged sample, an orchestral chord from Stravinsky’s The Firebird Suite, has gained some unlikely dispersion: a Fairlight was in the studio where Arthur Baker and Afrika Bambaataa recorded the early hip hop classic “Planet Rock” (1982), and they used that sample in the opening and throughout the whole piece (Fink 2005b). The cost of commercial samplers would quickly drop. The E-Mu Emulator digital sampler debuted in 1981 (at $10,000), with Stevie Wonder as one of the first customers. It was on an Emulator in 1984 that Marley Marl made his history-making discovery that a drum sound could be isolated, sampled, and combined with other sampled sounds. Polyphonic sampling (multiple keys triggering samples) arrived in 1984 with up to eight simultaneous voices in the Emulator II (at $8,000). The Ensoniq Mirage debuted in 1984 as the first keyboard sampler that sold for under $2,000.
Questlove points to Stevie Wonder sampling voices on the Cosby Show (aired February 20, 1986) with his Synclavier (a later model that sampled) as “the first time that 99 percent of us who went on to be hip-hop producers saw what a sampler was.” Soon after (in his midteens) he got a Casio SK-1, a toy keyboard sampler, synthesizer, and sequencer released in 1985 (for under $100), on which he learned the fundamentals of isolating and combining sounds, setting him on his path that would bear fruit with the Roots, one of the most innovative groups of the 1990s (Questlove and Greenman 2013: 66–69).
The Akai series of samplers designed by Roger Linn would eventually displace the E-Mu SP-1200, starting with the MPC 60 in 1988, with sixteen-voice polyphony, an upgraded 40 kHz stereo sample rate, Linn’s trademark quantize and swing rhythm correction, and the ability to play and record sequences in real time, combining a drum machine, sampler, and sequencer into one. The MPC 3000 (1994), which defined the sound of hip hop in the 1990s, featured CD quality sixteen-bit, 44.1 kHz sampling, and much more memory. Wu-Tang Clan cofounder and producer RZA has effectively summarized the role of technology in the development of hip hop with reference to the Akai MPC 3000: “If there’s ever a hip hop hall of fame Roger Linn has to be inducted within the first year…. He’s like the motherfucker who made the piano. He’s a genius that should never stop getting props. It’s like how Grandmaster Flash came with the [turntable] scratch—these guys are the true foundation of our culture. Even to this day 80 percent of hip hop is produced on that machine” (qtd. in Noakes 2014).28
The sound of 1980s rock and pop was deeply imbued with synthesized and sampled sounds. While British synthpop bands were overtly exploiting the potentials of the new technology, even guitar, bass, and drums-oriented bands were being enhanced. The massive snare drum, electronically enhanced by engineer and producer Bob Clearmountain, on dance-oriented music like David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” (1983) and Hall and Oates’s album Big Bam Boom (1984) was pervasive in the decade. In 1984 Clearmountain produced Bruce Springsteen’s highest-ever charting single, “Dancing in the Dark” (pop #2), which, along with “Born in the USA” (pop #9), left Springsteen’s trademark electric guitar by the wayside in favor of that 1980s ubiquitous snare drum sound (Milner 2009: 326–27).
Personal computers came on the market in the late 1970s, using a keyboard interface. In 1984 the Apple Macintosh debuted as the first to use a mouse that could manipulate a graphic cursor in the monitor, a major development that opened up the possibilities for new music-related software, such as Soundtools, which came out in 1989. Pro Tools software (still an industry standard), allowing four tracks of digital recording, came on the market in 1991 (at $4,000); by 1997 digital audio workstations (DAW) with forty-eight tracks came on the market. The instant easy editing capabilities of DAWs may have had some unintended consequences for musicianship: “The most common charge is that DAWs have dealt a fatal blow to the idea of musical spontaneity. Why get it right the first time when you can always fix it through plug-ins or judicious editing?” (Milner 2009: 299). That jury is still out, although it may be related to plummeting electric guitar sales in the past decade, from 1.5 million sold annually (the same amount sold in the mid-1960s) to just over 1 million in 2017 (Edgers 2017).
See figure 1. Copyright in the United States
See figure 2. Copyright timeline
See figure 3. Growth of the recording industry in the United States to the 1930s
See figure 4. Growth of radio in the United States
See figure 5. Music on television, 1940s–1980s
See figure 6. African Americans in starring roles in television
See figure 42. Blaxploitation films and the next generation
See figure 7. Magazines
See figure 8. Industry popularity charts (Billboard)
See figure 9. Grammy categories
See figure 10. Innovations in sound and musical instrument technology, 1948–2001
1 Both ASCAP (2019) and BMI (2019) have online searchable databases.
2 For more on copyright, see U.S. Copyright Office (2015, 2019a, 2019b, 2019c); for an in-depth history of U.S. copyright law and its implications see Vaidhyanathan (2001).
3 The standard text on the history of the music industry is Sanjek (1988, 1996), from which I draw extensively here.
4 Player pianos (or pianolas), dating to the 1870s, were automatically played when air pumped through perforations in a scrolling roll of paper caused piano keys to strike the strings. Coin-operated player pianos were introduced by the Wurlitzer Company in 1898. Figures cited are from Sanjek (1988, 2: 77, 296, 321–22).
5 Recently, computer analysis has allowed those traces to be heard (First Sounds 2008).
6 For more on the inventions of Edison and Berliner, see Library of Congress (2019a, 2019b) and UCSB Cylinder Archive (2019).
7 Zak (2001) and Horning (2013) offer rich explorations into the world of recording studios.
8 Digital enhancement of the acoustic recordings may downplay the contrast.
9 Figures for 1947 and 1955–60 are from Gillett (1996: 492) and those from 1999 to 2008 are from Hutchinson, Macy, and Allen (2010: 43). Sanjek (1996: 285, 333) gives both $214.4 and $204 million for 1947.
10 See the recent nine-part BBC radio series (Mason 2019) for an expansive history of the music industry and technology. For online histories of recording technology, see Beardsley and Leech-Wilkinson (2009) and Schoenherr (2005). For an online narrative of the record industry, see Medium (2014). For diverse studies of the music and recording industry, see Chapple and Garofalo (1977), Denisoff (1986), Goodman (1997), and Katz (2010).
11 The standard text on the history of broadcast radio is Barnouw (1966–70), from which I draw extensively here. More recent interpretive work includes Douglas (1987, 1999) and Smulyan (1994). Barnouw (1975) covers the history of television broadcasting.
12 For information on Dick Clark and American Bandstand, see Jackson (1997); for MTV, see Tannenbaum and Marks (2012).
13 RIAA (2019a) has a searchable database for gold and platinum records.
14 The references are to Wald’s House on Henry Street and Hurston’s Dust Tracks on the Road.
15 See Recording Academy (2019) for listings of Grammy Award winners and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (2019) for inductees.
16 Mayfair Recording, the second New York studio (after Atlantic) to go eight-track (in 1965), was used by the Velvet Underground and Frank Zappa in 1966–67. Motown went eight-track in 1964.
17