Catv Talent Release Form: Fill & Download for Free

Not in a million years. Digitization was positively not anticipated by prominent or influential music executives or commentators in the early 1980s. I watched thousands of hours of MTV and was a regular reader of Rolling Stone and Billboard, and other music magazines at the time, such as Creem and Hit Parader.There are several reasons for this: (1) Digital music only became available to pioneering consumers around 1983; (2) The hardware and other storage media was unavailable commercially, and there were no compressed formats; most people did not own computers or personal handheld devices, anyway; and (3) nothing like wifi or even telephone line or cable connectivity that could transmit that kind of signal was available commercially.The music industry through most of the 20th century was almost exclusively an analog world where the product for sale was physically shipped. An record album or cassette tape, for instance, was not thought of as information; it was thought of as a physical object, that weighed something, that had to be moved, and shipped, of which you sold X copies. I choose to think of this as--rather than an "accident"--the executives in the music industry continuing to choose to exploit their recording talent and the full pockets of their mostly young consumers, and ignoring the normal progress of technology which is far more consumer- youth- and artist-friendly. To this day, I doubt the music industry has fully "gotten the memo."I worked in music retail at a high-volume, family-owned used and new store in the Midwest from 1984 into 1991 (which eventually became a chain of over 24 stores). The only digital music was on CDs. In 1984, 98% of what we sold was vinyl and cassettes; we kept new CDs in a locked case and customers could look up what disks we had in stock in a binder. Disks sold for $15.99 or $16.99 each (used copies for $11.00), which is about $34.99 ($22.00 used price) today, accounting for inflation. Players then started at something like $300.00, which at the time was an exorbitant sum (do the math on the inflation adjustment), and it was at least another 10-15 years before CDs could be affordably played in vehicles. The only ones buying CDs and players in the early 80s were bachelors in their 20s or early 30s with great jobs. It was an extravagance. I did not buy a CD player until 1990 (about $100), and did not install one in my car until around 1999 (about $200).By the time I left the job for good in 1991, my store had made the switch and CDs became predominant. Obviously all records, tapes, and CDs were physically shipped to each store, and new releases made it to the floor each Tuesday.I have to digress for a minute. There was also a slogan the RIAA created: "Home Taping Is Killing Music," meaning physical vinyl-to-cassette or cassette to cassette recording, which was the dominant form of piracy. Home taping never killed music. This was just poor PR. You could rig two cassette decks together, and eventually electronics manufacturers devised dual cassette decks. Home taping in 1984 was a mild hindrance to sales. Home taping may have put a small dent in sales (our store mitigated it with generous agreed-upon buybacks of material that had gone out the door as new or mint condition used), but if a listener wanted the end product to sound good and look presentable, home taping was a far more laborious process than streaming or downloading a song or album is now; quality recording required good equipment, close attention, and it took place in real time. It was a violation of copyright law if the buyer did not own a copy of the disk he was taping (music tapers were almost all men, and none of them cared). Also, blank cassettes of any quality started then at $2.00-3.00 each (i.e., TDK or Maxell, not Memorex); the idea was to record one album on each side. It didn't make much financial sense to home tape unless the taper was building a large or highly-specialized collection; it was just as cheap in my opinion for most people to buy used albums or cassettes, perfectly legally. Any serious home taper is probably spending far more money on music than the average person, anyway. Because of this, the record companies were short-sighted, and basically complaining about a few eccentrics, i.e., men in their twenties determined not to buy any more than they absolutely had to, and who spent more time “collecting” than listening. If the record companies truly believed home taping was keeping prospective customers from being paying customers, they might have purchased a cassette tape manufacturer and sold blank tapes at retail.It says everything about the economics of home taping/piracy that young women, who also bought a significant amount of music, almost never did it. We did not typically sell girls blank cassettes. Ads for cassette tapes looked like ads for razors and were geared to men. Because home taping from one physical medium to another was time consuming, and not economically sound, and because it did not— contrary to the PR, “kill” music—it was not a serious threat to the industry.The point of this discussion of home taping? Because of digitization, it is far quicker, cheaper and easier to duplicate music now than ever. Music labels had no idea then of how close they would come to extinction in 20 years.Hardware in 1984 was scant or nonexistent as pertained to capturing music, other than cassette recorders. The idea of personal computers in 1984 was fairly new; we had neighbors with a Macintosh. They were a highly-educated married couple I also worked for. They updated their Macintosh Apple every couple years, and I was scared to turn it on. It seemed "frou-frou," though Macintoshes were advertised on TV as a business and educational tool, with endless possibilities. We lived in a nice area and no one else had a Mac. (If the IBM PC OS existed then, I was unaware of it. Tandy/Radio Shack sold one, and the medium was a cassette tape. A couple guys on my block had TRS-80s. Commodore from Canada was going out of business, or was on its way out of business.) If I recall, the portable storage medium was large floppy disks, if even that. It may have even been a blank cassette tape. People collect old Macs now. Theoretically these units may have had had the storage to play music (but no player built in), but not to write to a medium, and there was no medium to write to, and the hard disk in the unit had perhaps as much space as a very small, old, iPod. You could not have stored much music then; hard drive space is much, much cheaper now.There was far less connectivity in 1984, and certainly no iCloud. For 99.99% of us in 1984, we had to make a phone call from someone's place of business, home, or a phone booth. There was only connectivity from place to place by phone lines, or CATV. CATV was only used for TV; cable TV came to our neighborhood in spring of 1982. No one thought of using CATV for phone or much less internet. Internet by cable was not foreseen until about 1996, by then-MediaOne, when TV ads appeared. There was no connectivity to the internet for ordinary people, and in 1984 the internet barely existed; early users could not have had the extremely user-friendly interfaces we have now. I worked in a law firm off and on between 1988 and 1990, and around then, they networked their word processing, office wide, which was fairly cutting edge. E-mail and internet in offices were a decade away.Nothing pertaining to cell phones was anticipated in 1984, let alone ringtones. For many people, the phone was the rented black thing that hung in the kitchen, as a cable box is now. If you wanted more phones, you rented more extensions, and paid for each one every month. With the breakup of the Bell System in the early 1980s, people could buy their own phones and install them throughout the house. There was no infrastructure until the 1990s. The closest thing to cell phones in 1984, except a very few people who had radio phones in a battery-powered briefcase-type assembly, or chauffeur driven car with a radio hookup. (I didn't know anyone who had one.)