(3 of 4)
Heat like that is just a hassle, as the punks learned very fast. Their music gave way to the more aloof sounds of the New Wave, which either dead-ended in private experimentation or smoothed itself out into elegant pop cadences. Says Chris Stein of Blondie: "There is so much money to be made that radio and record companies are just totally paranoid. They won't change, they won't experiment. If the Stones were an unknown group and they came out with Satisfaction today, it probably wouldn't get any air play."
Columbia Records signed some 25 new acts in 1979; last year they signed ten. Albums that sold 150,000 copies in the mid-'70s were considered promising; today that kind of promise is in short supply. A record has either a hefty success or no sales at all; the middle ground is no-man's land. On the balance sheet, the pickings still look rich. The size of the industry more than doubled in a decade, from $1.66 billion worth of sales in 1970 to $3.68 billion in 1980. But that growth was maintained at great cost. Panic set in back in 1979 when dollar volume for the business tumbled 11%. Now, after cutbacks and corporate scrambling, the major labels have regained some of their equilibrium.
Some. Gone are the days of limos rented on a lark and unlimited room service from the kitchen and the pharmacy. Gone is much of the personnel, borne off by cuts in all echelons—sparing, of course, the most exalted executive suites, where gloom and consternation flourish nonetheless. There is no smart little outfit that has tapped into a new style or audience. No big company has been totally successful at using their 20-megaton talent to fend off the incursions of recession. "Record sales are flat," says an industry executive. "Everybody is making a nickel or a dime, but nobody is making millions."
Bottom-line types beef about everything from home recording and sales of blank tape cassettes to the boom in home video games and the counterfeiting of albums. Jules Yarnell, special counsel for the Recording Industry Association of America, estimates that companies lose $800 million every year through counterfeiting, piracy and bootlegging. Walter Yetnikoff, president of CBS Records Group, figures the industry loses 20% of its revenue just from home taping. Jack Reinstein, treasurer of Electra/Asylum/ Nonesuch Records, calculates 400 million albums were taped off the air in 1980 alone, "without any compensation to the artist, the songwriters and publishers, the musicians, the record company." Huffs Kal Rudman, professional music biz pundit: "It's grand larceny! It's outrageous!"
It is also passing the buck, even if one credits the statistics. The matter may be a lot simpler, and more daunting, than anything on a balance sheet. With the record companies concerned mostly about making records that radio will play, and with the radio stations unable to play anything but what the record companies give them, the music may just have got lost in a lot of corporate second-guessing. It may just have slipped out of context.