Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [254]
The motor for change was the dramatic growth of independent labels in the mid-1940s. Often owned by the proprietors of bars or clubs, or by record retailers, these labels focused on newer musical forms that they knew firsthand. Jazz was the outstanding example, followed by the urban, electrified blues of Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters. Independents were soon springing up across the country, in Memphis and Detroit as well as New York and Chicago. The luckier ones stood to profit immensely from their local knowledge and risk taking. As they did, so they developed broad distribution systems with remarkable speed, taking records and the music they bore across the nation. At the same time, urban radio stations began to diversify away from the homogeneity of the networks, targeting African Americans and white teenagers adoptingAfrican American music. The term rock'n'roll was coined by a Cleveland station chasing this market. The independents began to appear on Billboard's charts, and by the midi95os to dominate them. By i96o some three thousand labels existed, 8o percent of which were one-off efforts created to record a single session and sell perhaps a thousand copies of the disc. After a period of hoping that this new market would disappear, the majors lumbered in, signing the independents' artists or hiring white musicians to cover their songs in safer forms. The period was one of radical disaggregation, in which creativity was strongly associated with local expertise and almost domestic production.?
But production was not in fact done at home. Pressing discs remained almost entirely the preserve of manufacturing plants. In the 193os domestic record-cutting machines had been sold for a while, and there was an equally short efflorescence of recording technologies a decade later, led by the wire recorder. Some musicians-most notably, experimental modernists-were eager first adopters of such machines.8 But the technologies were fiddly and expensive, and in the case of wire acoustically unsatisfying too. More to the point, there seemed to be no desire for home recording. Pressing remained an industrial enterprise. Plants were autonomous firms, or else semiautonomous units of the big companies mandated to bring in contract work from outside. That would make the conglomerates both police and pirate at once.
The musician and aficionado Charles Smith ascribed the origins of record piracy to an ethos of collecting jazz records that dated from the twenties. Sometimes, Smith recalled, in order to get a final classic to round out one's collection, one had to get acetates made from a friend's copy. These acetates were called dubs, and the practice therefore came to be called dubbing. One of the first to make it into a commercial enterprise was a record retailer named Milt Gabler, who created United Hot Clubs of America. He was soon followed by others. As Gabler's chosen name suggests, early discs were often meant for circulation within "clubs" of like-minded enthusiasts, rather than for open sale. The record companies' own machines were put to use to make the discs -"on the level, open and above board."And theywould give their records titles like "classic swing," reinforcing their emergent sense of a canon.9 The practice languished in the Depression and the war, but revived smartly in the late 1940s, when it suddenly became prominent in the context of the battle of the speeds. Several labels emerged to reissue out-of-print jazz in the new formats. They had names like Hot Jazz Clubs of America (HJCA), Blue Ace, Jazz Panorama, Zee Gee, Jazz Time, and Viking. All were small concerns, and some were still professedly devoted to specific clubs-although how genuine these clubs really were is unclear. More ambitious than most was the self-consciously named Jolly Roger. The creation of a twenty-three-yearold New York enthusiast called Dante Bolletino, Jolly Roger rapidly