Hobbled by illegal downloads and crumbling business models, the music industry is desperate for any help it can get.
Variety magazine recently likened the continuing drop in CD sales to a stock market crash. Last week they suffered a 32 percent dip from the same period last year, adding insult to injury after many labels took a financial beating in the first quarter.
Only a handful of albums saw gains, thanks directly to a longtime friend of the industry: television.
Case in point: Brandi Carlile’s “The Story” rose 15 percent after her song showed up in “Grey’s Anatomy.” Jennifer Lopez’s “Como Ama una Mujer” enjoyed a 24,000-copy boost after her appearance on “American Idol,” bumping it up 21 spots on the Top 40 and driving increased iTunes downloads.
Sure, TV has been a useful tool in introducing and marketing pop music as long it has been around, but it’s increasingly so in a media world bursting with attention-getters.
“I’m very grateful for what it’s done for me,” said Taylor Hicks, winner of Season 5 of “American Idol.” “There’s definitely more of a storyline there, for sure.”
Hicks will perform at the Paramount Theatre on Sunday to a likely throng of Soul Patrol fans, the fervent base he cultivated during his “Idol” run. He had been singing, recording and performing professionally years before “Idol,” but the exposure was priceless, bringing him a vastly wider audience.
“I’m always comfortable on the stage because it’s who I am,” Hicks said. “You have to put yourself in the mindset that you’re playing to your audience and then cater to that audience.”
And what an audience. “Idol” has been the top-rated program on TV every week but one since it debuted its current season in January. (What beat it? The Super Bowl, of course.) “Idol’s” variety-show mix of performance and drama continues a proud marriage of pop music and TV dating back to the 1950s.
“TV puts on the radar screen a possible talent or song, because even at its lowest-rated moments it still reaches into millions of homes,” said Walter J. Podrazik, consulting curator at the Museum of Broadcast Communications in Chicago.
Podrazik, who co-wrote “Watching TV: Six Decades of American Television,” looks back as far as Ricky Nelson for the first example of the TV-pop star connection.
Nelson was the original American teen idol. He joined his father’s radio, and later TV show, “The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet,” as an actor in 1949. When his music career took off in the late ’50s, father and former bandleader Ozzie decided to end each episode with a musical appearance from Ricky. From 1957 to 1962, only Elvis Presley and Pat Boone rivaled Ricky in his number of Top 40 hits.
“It’s about exposing the audience to these personalities and connecting their faces to the music,” Podrazik said. “You don’t just hear people perform, you see the expressions on their faces and of people in the audience.”
Watching the same faces week after week breeds comfort and allegiance. That’s why pop music and television are perfect soulmates. The pop music genre, as most historians define it, began in the mid-1950s with the advent of rock ‘n’ roll, widespread economic prosperity and, appropriately, TV. The decade of the teenager helped cement pop’s connection with the TV youth audience.
Elvis Presley and the Beatles benefitted immeasurably from their sets on “The Ed Sullivan Show” when the images humanized and reinforced their personas. This was not the music of the elite, exclusive in that it required special training to appreciate. This wasn’t folk music, which prided itself on intimate, sometimes political sentiments. This was music for the masses.
In the 1960s, “The Monkees” patterned itself after Beatles’ films like “Help” by mixing musical bits with jump-cut comedy. They may have been manufactured just for an NBC show, but the Monkees – with the help of some of the best session musicians in Los Angeles – charted four No. 1 albums from 1966-1967.
Variety shows appealed to this broad sensibility, too. Pop duos Sonny and Cher and Donny and Marie had seen success before TV, but their concurrent, self-titled shows in the mid-’70s granted them consistent small-screen presence.
“You see a lot of things on TV and you don’t go buy all the products that are advertised, but at least now they’re introduced to your consciousness,” Podrazik said. “Generally it’s the repeated exposures that are the most successful.”
From Michael Jackson’s MTV video success to indie bands filling soundtracks for “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “The O.C.,” it’s clear TV’s cross-promotional sway is still heavy. However, fewer actual music videos make it on TV anymore. Digital video sites like YouTube and MySpace are the new frontier for musicians wanting to visually distribute their wares.
“Music videos were the rage back in the day and it hasn’t died,” said Lisa Gedgaudas, viral marketing director for Denver-based Mania TV. “That’s why everybody wants it, and why YouTube is so successful. People are way more conscious about what they’re watching, and they want it on demand.”
Mania TV is a round-the-clock music TV channel based exclusively online. Its recent growth hints that whatever the size of the screen, people want to see their music as much as hear it.
Still, those that benefit the most aren’t always able to experience the results.
“I don’t get to watch it much,” Hicks conceded.
At least he knows it always will be there for him – and any other musician lucky enough to get in front of the camera.
Staff writer John Wenzel can be reached at 303-954-1642 or jwenzel@denverpost.com.
