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How the music industry cut it's own throat.

Throughout most of the 80's the Major Labels were all about consolidation. Top 40 was their invention. What they wanted was everything neat and divided up easily. They wanted to be able to tell people that these are the top R&B songs. These are the top country songs. These are the top mainstream songs. That's all you can listen to, because that's all we want to sell you. They wanted to minimize the number of artists and the number of albums. That maximized profits. What they hated was when there were thousands of little bands, each with a loyal little following. Consolidation was the best way to minimize costs. Once you had an album it's cheaper to run 5 million copies of one CD. It's just a matter of scale. The more copies you make of a unit the cheaper each unit is. That's something anyone who's ever had business cards or t-shirts printed has found out.

The plan was coming along well.

Then the record industry was struck with a one two punch. Hip Hop and Nirvana ruined the whole thing.

First Hip Hop came along. Sure, it had been around since the 70's, at least. But it was put out on it's own record labels. Little indie labels that the big boys only noticed when they would occasionally buy one of their producers or pick up one of their acts.

But MTV put on Yo! MTV Raps in 1988. While it had been big before, now Hip Hop blew up. Instead of sticking to their plan of releasing a million Milli Vinilli and Tiffany clones they had to change their strategy. There were a lot of rap acts suddenly making money, and the record industry wasn't getting their cut. So they had to sign all the big rap acts or they had to buy the indie labels that signed them.

Then Nirvana came along, with a thousand little moderate punk bands with them. The labels had to do the same thing with the white music. Top 40 as a genre was mostly destroyed by this. Kurt Cobain called 1991 "The Year Punk Broke", well Rap broke about the same time.

But, little by little, the recording industry did it again. They bought lots of little labels and just folded them into the bigger company. They created their own little fake indie Labels, like Interscope. See, Nine Inch Nails had a contract with a little indie label called TVT. Something went wrong with the negotiations when a big label tried to buy them for their wonderboy, Trent Reznor. So they just had him break his contract, gave him his own fake label called Nothing Records under another fake label called Interscope.

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