The Recording Industry as the Enemy? A Case Study of Early West German Metal Music

Rock and metal music have a complex relationship with the entertainment industries. They rely on commodified products but are also cautious towards the capitalist system with its instrumentalist mechanisms. This article examines early metal music from West Germany in the 1980s with its rock precursors in the 1970s to shed light on the music industry’s positive side other than the commonly portrayed enemy or villain image. Using journalistic sources, including magazines, biographies, documentaries, besides the music release database Discogs, the research reconstructs the independent recording industry for metal, examining key record companies, distribution channels and production staff, as well as their principles and intentions. The findings suggest that in the formative phase of German metal, the boundaries were blurred between fans, artists and entrepreneurs, most acting out of a passion for music. Fan practices, such as music-making, journalistic writing or tape trading, became serious leisure careers, eventually enabling some of the bands, journalists and entrepreneurs to make a living from their metal-related activities; others remained “semi-professional”. Communal spirit characterised German metal, and most of “the industry” worked together with the scene. The joint efforts made it possible for Germany to develop from a weak production location for subcultural rock music compared to the dominant cultures of the USA and UK to one of the leading recording industries for metal music. Rather than “the enemy” with manipulative intentions, the independent metal industry was a cultural intermediary and enabler of subcultural production and consumption.

Gabinetes fonográficos in Valencia, 1899–1901

This chapter focuses on the gabinetes fonográficos active between 1899 and 1901 in Valencia—which can be rightly considered as the second main pole of the Spanish recording industry at the time. It discusses the rivalries that Valencia gabinetes maintained with their Madrid counterparts, and analyses how the compactness and connectedness of the city gave rise to a vibrant, yet ephemeral, recording culture. The chapter also discusses briefly the gabinetes located in cities other than Madrid, Valencia, and Barcelona, of which few traces have survived.

Inventing the recording

This chapter introduces the gabinetes fonográficos that appeared after the introduction of the Spring Motor Phonograph, Edison Home Phonograph, and Edison Standard Phonograph between 1896 and 1898; these were small recording labels which recorded their own wax cylinders employing local musicians and sold them directly to their customers, operating often precariously or for a limited amount of time. The chapter then discusses the gabinetes that were active between 1896 and 1905 in Madrid, then the main center of the nascent Spanish recording industry. The chapter examines how the Madrid gabinetes built upon ways of listening developed earlier in the decade to transform recorded sound into a commodity, and how, in doing so, they drew upon regeneracionista discourses concerning science, technology, modernity, and national identity.

(Dis)embodied voices

This chapter discusses the role of singers in shaping the nascent industry of the gabinetes fonográficos in Spain and, in turn, how the newly developing recording industry influenced their careers and on the music profession. It argues that, even though the phonograph did not revolutionize at this stage the working lives of Spanish singers, it planted the seeds for crucial developments that would take place in the following decades. Indeed, a few singers—only a minority of which had acquired celebrity status on stage—conscientiously developed the expertise and skills necessary to go into the studio, and managed to advance their careers on that basis, at least for a short period of time. Although the chapter does not deal with the minute details of performance practice, it discusses aspects of the music profession and its relationship with recordings that might inform study of performance practice.

Science, urban space, and early phonography in Barcelona, 1898–1914

The chapter focuses on the gabinetes fonográficos active in Barcelona from 1898 onward. It aims to analyze why Barcelona’s early recording industry remained more precarious and less successful than that in Madrid, and advances two reasons: the failure of the Barcelona gabinetes to position themselves within local discourses around science, technology, modernity, and Catalan national identity; and their increasingly peripheral location in the developing urban space of Barcelona. The chapter then discusses how Barcelona eventually came to lead the Spanish recording industry after the advent of the gramophone, with a subsidiary of Gramophone and a new generation of record shops opening in the city.

Conclusion: From national to global

The conclusion sums up how the cultural history of the phonograph in Spain can prompt a re-examination of the global history of early recording technologies, and lists four areas in which this re-examination might be particularly necessary. Firstly, the role of Edison, his companies, and other recording multinationals in crafting and spreading the idea of the recording as a concept and setting the foundations of the recording industry might need to be further re-evaluated and contextualized. Secondly, increased attention needs to be paid to the national and local characteristics that impinged discourses around modernity in the period at hand. Thirdly, the early history of recording technologies needs to be read as a history of possibilities, shaped by national, regional, and local cultural specificities. Fourthly, greater awareness should develop of how indigenous repertoires contributed to shaping recording practices and ontologies of recording technologies in particular ways, rather than recording technologies being used to passively record what was already there.

Inventing the Recording

Inventing the Recording: The Phonograph and National Culture in Spain, 1877–1914 focuses on the decades in which the recording went from technological possibility to commercial and cultural artifact, and it does so through the analysis of a specific and unique national context: Spain. It tells the stories of institutions and individuals in the country, discusses the development of discourses and ideas in close connection with national concerns and debates, and pays close attention to original recordings from this era. The book starts with the arrival in Spain of notices about Edison’s invention of the phonograph in 1877, followed by the first demonstrations (1878–1882) at the hands of scientists and showmen. These demonstrations greatly stimulated the imagination of scientists, journalists, and playwrights, who spent the rest of the 1880s speculating about the phonograph and its potential to revolutionize society once it was properly developed and marketed. The book then moves on to analyze the “traveling phonographs” and salones fonográficos of the 1890s and early 1900s, with phonographs being paraded around Spain and exhibited in group listening sessions in theaters, private homes, and social spaces pertaining to different social classes. It finally covers the development of an indigenous recording industry dominated by the so-called gabinetes fonográficos: small businesses that sold imported phonographs, produced their own recordings, and shaped early discourses about commercial phonography and the record as a commodity between 1896 and 1905.

‘Modulation’ by Richard Powers: Digital sound, compression and the short story

This article presents a reading of ‘Modulation’ (2008) by Richard Powers. Firstly, I consider the short story’s representation of the MP3 music file, specifically its effects on how music is circulated and stored, as well as how it sounds. These changes are the result of different processes of compression. The MP3 format makes use of data compression to reduce the file size of a digital recording significantly. Such a loss of information devises new social and material relations between what remains of the original music, the recording industry from which MP3s emerged and the online markets into which they enter. I argue that ‘Modulation’ is a powerful evocation of a watershed moment in how we consume digital sound: what Jonathan Sterne has termed the rise of the MP3 as ‘cultural artifact’. I contend that the short story, like the MP3, is also a compressed manner of representation. I use narrative theory and short story criticism to substantiate this claim, before positioning ‘Modulation’ alongside Powers’s novels of information. I conclude by suggesting that ‘Modulation’ offers an alternative to representing information through an excess of data. This article reads Powers’s compressed prose as a formal iteration of the data compression the story narrates.

Music Recording and the Recording Industry

Records have become an essential source for popular music history. The article discusses the technical development and global expansion of the international recording industry from the 1890s to the 2010s. Production peaked in 1929 and started to grow again after the Second World War. As the technology developed, independent recording studios were established, and the infrastructure for making records became widely available. The article also discusses the special case of record production in the Soviet Union. In the early days of radio, stations produced music themselves, but since the 1960s, radio has mostly relied on records. Many public broadcasters still have large music archives. Television has also been important for documenting and marketing music. Since 2000, the recording industry has made a successful transition to the internet. Access to social networks has given birth to a large number of microproducers, and the role of music videos has increased.