Did Woodstock '99 herald the death of music? Or maybe it was 1998, when mainstream originality
was Auto-Tuned into oblivion. Either way, the 1990s was bad times for good music.
Avid concertgoers have found their hobby getting more and more expensive for decades,
and the trend toward more pricey concert tickets began in earnest in the early '90s. According
to the Los Angeles Times, it was then that the country's biggest ticket seller, Ticketmaster,
acquired its biggest competitor, Ticketron, which enabled it to ramp up a practice
that music fans already weren't too keen on: Charging hidden "service fees" that, depending
on the ticket price set by the venues, could increase the cost of a ticket by 50% or more.
Fortunately for the fans, the Justice Department — concerned about Ticketmaster's all-but-cornering
of the market — approached the biggest rock band on the planet at the time, Pearl Jam,
about a possible counter-offensive. In 1994, at the DOJ's urging, Pearl Jam cut ties with
the ticket giant, filed a formal complaint with the DOJ, and mounted their own tour,
demanding that venues charge only an $18 flat fee and a reasonable $1.80 service charge.
"One of the country's hottest rock bands went before Congress
Thursday to explain why it's not playing any concerts this summer."
Yay! Except…not yay. While the ticket behemoth did trim some of its more exorbitant fees,
the antitrust probe against it was thrown out, and Pearl Jam's DIY tour collapsed amid
logistical difficulties, as also reported by the Los Angeles Times. To this day,
the practice of tacking hidden fees onto concert tickets continues largely unchecked.
If you listened to a lot of radio in the mid-to-late '90s, you may have noticed a
slight change to your favorite station's playlists. That is, they began to shrink
until they seemed to only play the same 20 or so songs over and over again. You may
have also heard said station begin referring to something called "Clear Channel," which was
a media conglomerate that once owned a few dozen stations, because that's all it legally could own.
But, as noted by LA Times reporter Jeff Leeds, that all changed in 1996, when the broadcast
lobby successfully implored Congress to help the struggling radio industry by removing that cap.
Overnight, instead of a hard limit of 40 stations, a huge company could buy as many stations as
it wanted — and, also seemingly overnight, Clear Channel bought up roughly all of them.
With one conglomerate in control of all those playlists, the effect was noticeable and
immediate. If you weren't listening to those same 20 songs on a Clear Channel station,
you were probably listening to a slightly more diverse "JACK" station owned by Canadian
conglomerate SparkNet Communications, and neither were exactly kind to smaller artists or subgenres.
Perhaps ironically, the advent of streaming in recent years has put Clear Channel – rebranded
as the slightly friendlier-sounding iHeart Radio – on the financial ropes,
according to Texas Monthly. But you still can't find much diversity on the radio to this day,
and that one act of Congress in 1996 is why.
It's impossible to describe the impact MTV had from the day it
showed up on your local cable carrier — on music, on television, on the radio,
and on pretty much everything else. The channel launched on August 1, 1981,
and while it took a bit for it to spread to all of the major markets, its power to break artists
nobody had ever heard of and turn them into overnight sensations soon became undeniable.
Later in the decade, MTV helped facilitate the advent of rap, and in the early '90s,
it did the same for grunge ... but around that same time, a noticeable shift started to happen.
Beginning with the reality series "The Real World," MTV began to focus more on
increasingly weird reality offerings, and much less on music, which was, you know,
the "M" part of its name. By the end of the '90s, reality-slash-competition shows like
"Lip Service" and "Road Rules," along with straight-up reality series like "True Life"
and "FANatic," had muscled their way into more and more of the network's programming,
and by the middle of the next decade, music had all but disappeared from the rotation.
Speaking with CNET in 2011, former VJ Adam Curry explained the reason for the change,
which should surprise no one: money. At that time, according to Curry,
MTV was raking in $4 billion per year — great for MTV, not so great for musicians and their fans.
It might sound odd if you weren't around, but there was a time in
the mid-'80s when the government decided to go to war with music — specifically,
with lyrics that were deemed to be inappropriate.
"Today, our own government is trying to tell you what
you should and shouldn't pop into your tape deck."
Their organization, the "Parents' Music Resource Center" or PMRC, is the one responsible for those
"Parental Advisory — Explicit Lyrics" stickers that are probably featured on all of your old CDs,
and the damage it did to freedom of expression continued to have a dramatic effect in the '90s.
For one thing, censorship likely played a role in MTV's transformation. According
to the National Coalition Against Censorship, between 1984 and 1994,
the number of videos the network was forced to edit due to content rose from one in 10
to one in three, which really sounds like a hassle for everyone involved.
For another thing, that Parental Advisory sticker had an immense chilling effect.
As outlined in a paper for the University of Miami, Wal-Mart — the nation's largest
retailer — refused to carry any release carrying it, a practice that continues to this day.
The '90s were generally a pretty sweet decade for music festivals; it's the decade in which
Lollapalooza and Vans Warped Tour were born, and in '94, one of the biggest festivals in history,
Woodstock, got a pretty successful reboot. To close out the decade and the millennium,
a group of intrepid organizers decided to once more capitalize on a name synonymous with peace,
love, and all that mushy stuff to stage what was then one of
the biggest festivals in history: Woodstock '99. It did not go well.
A combination of poor planning, virtually non-existent crowd control, blazing hundred-degree
heat, and a lack of water and shelter combined to turn the event into a powder keg packed with over
200,000 extremely annoyed people. According to SFGate, some of the artists themselves
assisted in driving the event toward complete chaos: Insane Clown Posse tossed hundred dollar
bills into the crowd to predictable effect, Kid Rock demanded that festival goers pelt the stage
with overpriced water bottles, and Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit all but openly encouraged a stampede.
"When you see it with your own eyes, it was just, in Times' word, shocking."
When it was all over, the festival made headlines for all the wrong reasons ... namely arson,
looting, vandalism, and dozens of hospitalized fans. The San Francisco Examiner probably best
summed up the festival with the title: Woodstock '99: The Day the Music Died.
It's no secret that the music business isn't exactly the least shady of industries,
and there have always been managers, promoters, and executives more than willing to take
advantage of hot artists to their own ends. But some of the more ultra-shady practices,
as outlined by producer Steve Albini in his essay "The Problem With Music," really came into vogue
in the '80s and '90s — notably, the practice of throwing absurd amounts of money at new signees,
only to forcibly recoup all those Benjamins for stuff like studio time and promotional expenses.
"And that system exists to support itself. It doesn't exist to support the bands."
This resulted in '90s icons like Toni Braxton and Courtney Love going broke,
sometimes filing multiple bankruptcies — and perhaps nobody got shafted harder than TLC.
Despite being one of the highest record selling girl groups in history, TLC endured financial
hardships even at the height of their fame as a result of poor management and wack contracts. As
reported by Beat, all three members filed for bankruptcy on July 3, 1995 — at the
exact moment their hit single "Waterfalls" was screaming toward the top of the Billboard chart.
A decade and a half later, in 2011, that same publication was reporting that lead
singer Tionne "T-Boz" Watkins was filing for bankruptcy again — for the second time that year.
It's pretty common knowledge that many of the Disney Channel's stars of the early '90s became
the massive pop stars of the late '90s — think Justin Timberlake, Britney Spears,
and Christina Aguilera. Of course, some of these — like Spears, for instance — became the cautionary
tales of the '00s, unprepared as they were for the ridiculous level of fame they were thrust into.
If there's one individual who exemplified the decade's seeming ultra-willingness to
chew up and spit out young stars, it would be Lou Pearlman, the infamous former manager
for the Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC, among others. As outlined by In Touch Weekly,
Pearlman's abuses were myriad, such as pocketing the vast majority of
the Backstreet Boys' earnings during the height of their fame, to name one example.
"Lou Pearlman created the Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC,
and he cashed in big on their fame at their expense."
Former LFO singer Rich Cronin, one of Pearlman's young charges, said:
"Honestly, I don't think Lou ever thought we would become stars ... I
just think he wanted cute guys around him; this was all an excuse. And then
lightning crazily struck and an empire was created. It was all dumb luck."
Perhaps, but the $300 million Ponzi scheme Pearlman was running during his
rise certainly wasn't; he was charged with financial crimes
and sentenced to prison in 2008, where he died eight years later.
When it comes to the way music is actually recorded — and, therefore, the way the final
product sounds — few periods were more significant than the '90s, and not in a fantastic way. The
rise of digital audio workstations like Pro Tools removed a lot of warmth from recordings,
to the extent that many engineers would simply dub digital tracks back onto tape to add some
warmth back in. Part of the issue, though, was the new dominant medium — CDs, which removed
a limitation of vinyl that actually ended up making many recordings sound much, much worse.
See, if a mix engineer pushed the limits of loudness prior to CDs,
it wouldn't work — played back on a vinyl record, the earth-shaking volume would force the needle
right out of the groove. Digital recording enabled engineers to go buckwild with pushing the volume
shelf. While this trend was born in the '90s, it arguably reached its peak with Metallica's 2008
album "Death Magnetic," which famously sounds like it's being played on a single loudspeaker inside
an empty dumpster. This trend likely played a part in vinyl's unlikely resurgence within
the last decade or so — because it turns out that when it comes to recorded music,
even if your band plays music designed to wake the dead, sheer volume isn't everything.
In 1997, research engineer Andy Hildebrand invented an audio plug-in that could correct
the pitch of an incoming signal, allowing even the worst singers
to sing in tune. He named his invention "Auto-Tune," and it would take all of one
year before someone used the innovation in flagrant violation of its intended purpose.
You see, Auto-Tune, used properly, sounds subtle and completely natural — but in 1998,
producers Mark Taylor and Brian Rawling discovered that if you dialed each setting down to zero,
the result was the complete opposite of that. Sure, it would force a vocal right on pitch,
and it also made the vocalist sound like a soulless android. Elated,
Taylor and Rawling applied the technique to the lead vocal on Cher's hit single
"Believe" — and that was it, folks, game over. The aggressively wrong use of Auto-Tune swiftly
became a mainstay in popular music, and it has remained so ever since.