HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT

3.      The 1970s  
In the early 1970s the popular mainstream was dominated by superstar rock groups, such as the Rolling Stones, the Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, and Chicago, and by individual superstars, such as Stevie Wonder and Elton John. Each of these groups and individual artists produced multiple albums, each of which sold millions of copies, pushing the industry to operate at a new scale.

Also highly popular was the singer-songwriter genre, an outgrowth of urban folk music led by artists Carole King, James Taylor, and Jackson Browne. At the other end of the stylistic spectrum, the heavy-metal style was pioneered by bands Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and Deep Purple, all of which featured aggressive guitar-laden songs. Art rock, represented by bands such as Emerson, Lake and Palmer, combined influences from classical music and displays of technical skill with spectacular stage shows. Glitter rock, or glam rock, cultivated a decadent image complete with such musicians as David Bowie and Marc Bolan wearing heavy makeup and sequined costumes and presenting themselves as sexually androgynous.

The most popular dance music of the 1970s was disco. Initially associated with the gay subculture of New York City, disco drew upon black popular music and simplified rhythms by adding steady bass-drum beats. Although much despised by aficionados of heavy metal, disco had a substantial impact on rock music, especially after the release of the motion picture Saturday Night Fever (1977) and its hugely successful disco soundtrack featuring the group the Bee Gees.

The 1970s also saw the development of funk, a variant of soul music that was influenced by rock. Influential funk musicians included singer Sly Stone with his San Francisco band Sly and the Family Stone, and vocalist George Clinton, whose groups Parliament and Funkadelic blended social satire and science-fiction imagery with African-derived rhythms, jazz-influenced horn music, long improvised jams, and vocal group harmonies.

About 1976 punk rock originated in New York City and London as a reaction against the commercialism of mainstream rock and the pretentiousness of art rock. Punk-rock music was raw, abrasive, and fast. London punk groups included the Sex Pistols, the Clash, and the Police (see Sting), while New York punk and new wave (a style similar to punk) music included the bands the Ramones, Blondie, and Talking Heads, and vocalist Patti Smith.

Also in the mid-1970s, reggae music—developed by musicians in the shantytowns of Kingston, Jamaica—began to attract attention among youth in Great Britain and the United States. The style, associated with political protest and the Rastafarian religion, combined elements of Jamaican folk music with American R&B influences. Reggae's popularity among American college students was stimulated by the 1973 film The Harder They Come, which starred reggae singer Jimmy Cliff in the role of an underclass gangster. The superstar of the style was Bob Marley, who by the time of his death in 1981 had become one of the most popular musicians in the world.

Despite these diverse stylistic developments, the music business in the United States had actually become more centralized in the 1970s. Spontaneous mass gatherings, epitomized by Woodstock, had been replaced by carefully managed stadium concerts. The individualistic local radio programming of the late 1960s was substituted with national radio formatting, in which music tailored to sell products to certain audiences was distributed nationally on tape to be broadcast from local stations. Economic factors encouraged major record companies to pursue almost exclusively artists with the potential to sell millions of copies of albums. While potential profits from hit albums had risen greatly, the financial risks involved in producing such music had also increased considerably. From 1978 to 1982 the American rock-music industry experienced financial difficulties as sales of recorded music dropped by almost $1 billion and receipts from live concerts experienced a similar decline.