Some people blame the decline in popular music quality on the decline of gradual disappearance of A & R in the music business. Yet most folks outside the music business—and even quite a few within it—don’t have a clear idea of what A &R is. It is a hoary term in the business. Literally, A & R stands for “artist and repertoire” and in the early days of the record business an A & R man—and the most always were (and largely still are) males—was responsible for signing commercially viable artists to record, arranging sessions and selecting appropriate, commercially viable songs for the artist to record. The songs tended to come from professional songwriters and publishers. At that time the business was more about hit songs than hit artists. That’s why when a song hit for someone, dozens of other artists would “cover” it, to do their own versions as quickly as possible and ride on the coattails of a hit.
All that started to change with the advent of rock ‘n’ roll, which was outsider music originally, was to some extent beyond the purview of the professional establishment songwriters, as were country, R & B and blues, but those style rarely penetrated the mainstream. Rock ‘n’ rollers such as Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Fats Domino (in conjunction with his producer Dave Bartholomew), and Buddy Holly wrote much of their material. Also much of rock ‘n’ roll was initially released by relatively small independent labels happy to jump on any good song or artist who came in off the street or was making some local or regional noise. But the professionals caught on fast and began writing rock n’n roll tunes while a new generation of professional songwriters—Lieber & Stoller and Otis Blackwell being two prime examples—who understood rock ‘n’ roll sprang up. So even until 1964, a large percentage of popular hits still came from the pens of professional songwriters—Motown being a prime example.
Then the Beatles happened and along with them a new breed of self-contained rock ‘n’ roll bands who wrote much , if not all, of their own material. The Beatles’ inspired a generation of musicians to write their own material. Indeed that became the ideal, especially with the advent of bands in the late Sixties/early Seventies who expanded the boundaries of rock (and popular) music. In the R & B world, Stevie Wonder’s run of self-penned masterpieces from 1960’s “Innervisions” to 1973’s “Songs In The Key Of Life” h ad a similar effect in the R & B world, especially with the explosion of self-contained progressive R & B/funk bands such as Earth, Wind & Fire, The Meters, War, Kool & The Gang and others who wrote their own boundary-pushing material. Finally the early Seventies saw an explosion of “singer-songwriters” such as James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne and others who cemented the concept of songwriter-as-performer. Indeed, Carole King, who ironically been one of the Brill Building pro songwriters of the early Sixties cranking out hits for other artists, scored one of the biggest-selling albums of all time with “Tapestry”, an album singing her own compositions. The Beatle/Stevie Wonder/singer-songwriters—that was a trifecta that marginalized professional songwriters on the one hand and enshrined the concept of “artist-as-songwriter” as the ideal musical artist. Singers or bands who didn’t write their own material suddenly seemed less important, less “serious.” As artists (and producers) began writing more,
they found they could make a lot more money if they recorded material written or co-written by themselves. As a result, by the 1980’s, a large percentage of popular music was being written by artists or their producers. It was no longer a case of an A & R person selecting material for an artist, though of course A & R people did try to maintain some sort of control by rejecting or pushing for revisions of an artist’s original material.
But that was a difficult process singe the artist would have a personal/emotional stake in their own material The result? A decline in the quality of songs being recorded. Let’s face it, most artists—including many really good singers and really good musicians—are not as proficient songwriters as The Beatles, Stevie Wonder or Joni Mitchell. Many artists can write a really good song or two every year but usually not on a regular basis. Some excellent singers/players might never write anything better than mediocre songs.
So if A & R people no longer ruled repertoire selection, what have they been doing the past thirty years? Well, the “artist” side of their mandate was still operative. The job still involved scouting talented new artists or finding viable veterans with the right combination of ability, fan-base, “buzz”, charisma etc. Once an artist was signed, the A & R person’s job was to nurture the artist, orchestrating a new artist’s development or helping a veteran artist conceptualize a new project. In both cases, this often involved selecting the right producer who could translate the artist’s work into either artistically or commercially (hopefully both) viable recordings.
But beginning in the Eighties, producers—especially in the realm of R & B and hip-hop but also in pop and even rock—became increasingly dominant. Recorings started to become more often an assemblage of tracks, often electronically generated or assembled, rather than being the product of musicians playing together in the studio. Producers themselves began attracting and developing new artists who they could plug in to their productions, rather than tailoring material to artists who had developed a unique artistic identity. This to a significant degree supplanted the discovery and development work of label A & R people. Often the take of an A & R people became forging relationships and doing deals with hot producers, rather than artists.
By the Nineties, major labels, especially, were flush with cash and became hyper-focused on quick hits. The cost of signing, developing, promoting and marketing an artist became so high that the labels were under pressure to recoup their investment on the first album by an artist, whereas in the past they could afford to wait through two or three albums of modest success for an artist to hit. Artist development—the other A & R function—began to atrophy at major labels. And for a while, they didn’t mind. The CD explosion and the huge return on hits, rendered the failures irrelevant. A major typically lost money on 80% or even 90% of their front line releases—but one hit paid for the nine failures and yielded major profits. A blockbuster mentality emerged.
One result of these developments has been that young A & R people coming up never learned the classic A & R skills of their predecessors. If they could connect with hot upcoming producers, find an artist with the right “look”, score that big pop hit 10% of the time, they could have a job. But selecting material or nurturing artists or even understanding what a career artist might be like were skills increasingly not learned by the new generation of A & R people. By the 2000’s, the corporatization of the major labels was complete. Most of the majors had been bought by huge conglomerates whose main business was not music and sometimes not even entertainment. These companies were primarily concerned with “market share”, “quarterly profits” and “share price.” Their huge side and frequent regime changes resulted in staff turnover, including in the A & R realm—the putative creative heart of a music company.
Another factor at play is that from the late Sixties on, artists were increasingly able to demand creative control. As long as labels were making money hand over fist, which they did for at least a couple of decades up until the early 2000’s and the rise of the internet, they were happy to indulge artists. They didn’t care if nine out of ten of their artists failed or didn’t develop beyond one hit. One might think that artists having creative control would be a good thing. In the bad old days artists had no power and were more often than not dictated to regarding what songs they would record, what producer they would use, even what studio they would record in. That often resulted in artists being squeezed into cookie-cutter formulas; at worst, artists were saddled with wildly inappropriate material or production, which was artistically unsatisfying and often commercially worthless. But too much creative freedom can be a problem also, especially in the realm of art created for the commercial marketplace. Popular music is commercial art. Most artists can benefit from an editor, an advisor, someone who understands who they are as artists but can also give them perspective, helping the artist to find a commercially viable, artistically effective manifestation of his or her work. That is needed today as much as ever and A & R people should be providing it. But as noted above, there are fewer A & R people with the expertise, knowledge or experience to do this. Major labels are less likely to give even those A & R people who are qualified the latitude that they need to be effective. And artists more often than not regard the A & R person’s involvement as a necessary evil or intrusion. Good A & R is an art in itself. The lack of it is a major reason why so much popular music being recorded today is not very special.
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