The Year in Music 1998
THE BIGGEST MUSIC STORY OF 1998 wasn’t on the charts, it was on the business pages: Seagram’s $10.4 billion acquisition of Polygram, which gives the new company roughly a quarter of the $11.4 billion recording market. As a result, once-mighty labels like A&M and Geffen are on the way to losing their identities; costs are being cut, jobs slashed, and fewer ears and eyes will be on the lookout for the next big thing. “Fewer people at the controls is not a good thing for music and the artists,” says one executive. “There will be even more of an emphasis on ‘get me a hit now.’ If you’re an edgy act from Omaha that needs nurturing or a lot of time to develop, forget about it.”
More than ever, it seems, the emphasis is on instant gratification, not artist development. Follow-up albums by established acts are now judged like big-budget Hollywood sequels that are to be closely tracked at the SoundScan box office. On a weekly basis, corporate bean counters and trend-hungry media wait with baited breath to see if the public will line up for Alanis II, The Smashing Pumpkins: The Next Day or Bruce Springsteen: The Earlier Years. “First-week sales definitely set the tone,” says one record-company executive. “If a record doesn’t open up to expectations, meetings are called and people start to rethink how much money was spent and will be spent in the future.” Budgets for touring, videos and radio promotion dry up, and what may have been simply a slow start becomes an instant failure.
This, after all, was the year when industry insiders were as hungry for failures as they were for successes — as long as the flops were someone else’s. Hole and Marilyn Manson’s albums were both deemed disappointments before either band had a chance to tour; the Smashing Pumpkins’ Adore was considered an underperformer practically before it was released. “If I put out what is apparently a testy record,” Billy Corgan told ROLLING STONE, “listen to it and then tell me you don’t like it. I don’t think I got that chance.” Corgan is right – with radio stations using phone polls and auditorium testing of snippets of songs to instantly gauge their audience’s reaction and help determine their playlists, no one gets much of a chance.
For better and for worse, we are living in a remarkable, precarious time when popular music divides and multiplies like a punch-drunk paramecium, yet the record companies that live and die by that music are consolidating in a big and — if you work for them — painful way. As many as 3,000 employees of the new Seagram giant may lose their jobs in the next few months, and more than a hundred bands will likely be dropped.
Any sober look at the state of music in 1998 reminds us that even in a business focused on creation, things do fall apart – labels, careers, genres – and sometimes the center cannot hold. In fact, to ponder the state of music as it faces its own Y2K quandaries is to wonder if there really is a center anymore.
Is it Method Man or Celine Dion?
Metallica or Shania Twain?
Lauryn Hill or Ricky Martin?
Beastie or Backstreet Boys?
Manson or Hanson?
Still, to hear the Record Industry Association of America’s figures tell it, the sky is far from falling – it may even be getting a little higher. Despite threats from the Internet – including MP3 technology, a bootlegger’s cyberdream – album sales in the first half of 1998 were up twelve percent over the same period last year, to $5.7 billion. And that was before Alanis, Garth and Jewel ushered in a solid Christmas season.
There are worries, though. “It’s a scary time,” says Johnny Wright, the former New Kids on the Block manager who hit big with one of this year’s hottest trends, the teen pop of the Backstreet Boys and ‘N Sync. Even while he’s riding high, Wright sees lows in 1998’s sales: “With ‘N Sync, we’re at 3 million sold and 4 million in the stores right now. That’s great, but at the same time with New Kids, we were at, like, 11 or 12 million. People are being very conservative about what records they buy, and the record labels are being very conservative about what they put in the stores.”
The RIAA itself has definitely noticed how conservative shoppers are being – particularly those between the ages of fifteen and nineteen, who are buying, on average, only seventeen records a year. Concerned that a generation is growing up with more of an interest in the Internet and video games than in record stores and CDs, the RIAA has been meeting with record labels to try to sort out plans for a $30 million ad campaign to persuade consumers to buy more music.
Last year, fifteen rock records (if you count Eric Clapton’s Pilgrim) each sold more than a million copies – compared with ten soundtracks and twelve hip-hop albums (if you count the Bulworth soundtrack). And though you could argue about the merits of Matchbox 20, Third Eye Blind and Creed, you can’t argue with this: In 1998 the cultural and artistic momentum was with the rappers not the rockers. And not for the first time: Barring the explosion of grunge from 1991-1994, this has been true for the last ten years.
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