Finding a Clear Vision of a "Cloudy" Future

Back to the subject of AM & FM radio and cultural change, though, not only because I can remember and reminisce about Rock and Roll and how huge the Beatles were, but also because I was taken by how well these issues of cultural change came to light in a segment on NPR's All Things Considered news show yesterday afternoon. The segment was about the 40th Anniversary of the release of the Beatles LP Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band on June 1 in England and June 2 in the US, where they mentioned the connection between the release of this album and its impact on FM radio and popular music culture.

This radio segment made me think of how clear our vision is in hindsight and the impact of creative artists to stimulate change in our collective concepts of our culture, as well as on technology adoption. As the saying goes, "Hindsight is 20/20," and we're not always clear about what the future holds until some inspired creative types show us. By then the world has changed, as the masses start to "get" a new way of looking at things and they get swept up into the mainstream.

The NPR news article talked about the impact the groundbreaking album, voted #1 All-Time in Rollingstone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, had on the music industry and popular culture. It described the popularity of AM radio, but also how its limitations became evident with this pop event. The stock in trade of the AM radio format was playing singles, for instance - that's what pop radio did - it made hits out of singles, which one could then go buy at a record store as 45 RPM records, with an A side and a B side. Popularity of songs was tracked on Billboard magazine's Hot 100 and later, Casey Kasem's American Top 40, which captured the Top 40 on the Top 100 and showcased them. I used to listen to that show in the early 1970s on Saturday mornings. Ah, good times ... sigh ....

The release of this Beatle's album had been eagerly awaited, but when it came out, it created a shock to the popular culture, because there were no singles released. That's what the Beatles did as confident pop stars and creative artists. Their music took on a new format as an art form - it was part of a comprehensive work meant to be listened to as one piece, and it was much more complicated and layered, because the Beatles had decided to stop touring and spend more time in the studio making more complex music. Playing such longer-themed music became the job of FM radio, then an obscure "new" media seeking to get established. There was also the fear among radio stations of being censored by the FCC for some of the drug references in the songs on the album, which were only much later revealed to be mostly in the imagination of listeners.

The music recording industry, in their infinite wisdom, phased out the single format in the late 1980s, for fear that it prevented the sale of albums. For a while, the novelty and improved quality of digital CDs kept the industry going, but they got greedy and lost touch with what consumers wanted (surprise - they DIDN'T want to pay $16.95 for a CD that only had one "hit" song on it). At least that's how I see it. So we see the market working when the music single returned with the help of Apple's iPod and its accompanying website, iTunes. Steve Job in his wisdom has been able to consistently innovate and leverage digital technology, this time with the ubiquity of the PC (or the Mac), making the Internet a new and popular distribution medium for music.

So what comes next with more and more broadband out there? Hard to say, but we can imagine significant changes in our popular culture, and a continuation of this process. Cultural leaders and creative artists push out the boundaries of established "rules of the road," and challenge the status quo. They capture the imagination of the public and create new business models that take advantage of new technologies. And it will be the same with massive availability of broadband - the content will morph to accommodate and take advantage of new capacity. Just watch and have faith that the bandwidth will not go to waste.