Chapter 5: Sound Recording and Popular Music
True/False
1. Thomas Edison made his first sound recordings on a cylinder wrapped in foil.
2. Unlike Edison’s phonograph, Emile Berliner’s gramophone played flat disks.
3. The recording industry switched from shellac to vinyl records during World War II.
4. Popular music did not exist until the invention of phonographs.
5. Blues music originated in the urban taverns of Southern California.
6. Motown Records attracted a young, white audience primarily by emphasizing romance, vocals,
and dance music over rebellion and politics.
7. Punk rock emerged in the 1970s partly to protest the commercialism of the recording industry.
8. An artist’s royalties make up only a small fraction of the sales price of a CD.
9. A key factor in the success of the MP3 format was its ability to send or receive music without
having to compress sound.
10. One advantage of polyvinyl records over shellac records is that they were less likely to break.
11. Audiotape was developed by the Japanese after World War II.
12. Until the invention of digital recording, records were made using an analog recording process.
13. In the 1920s, hundreds of radio stations went off the air because they could not afford to pay for
the rights to broadcast recorded music.
14. The popularity of the jukebox caused record sales to drop sharply in the 1930s.
15. Competition from TV in the 1950s helped the radio and recording industries become allies.
16. The music industry has successfully hindered systems that enable free music file sharing.
17. Cleveland deejay Alan Freed helped popularize black music with white audiences.
18. In the late 1950s, singers Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis stopped performing rock and roll
because they believed that it was the “devil’s music.”
19. In the 1950s, it was common practice for black artists to cover songs first recorded by white
performers.
20. Jimi Hendrix was a star of rock’s psychedelic era.
21. The Rolling Stones emphasized hard rhythms and vocals in their music, whereas the Beatles
stressed melody.
22. Folk is considered a more democratic and participatory form of music than other musical
genres.
23. Grunge music became a significant form of rock and roll in 1992 as a result of a breakthrough
album by Nirvana.
24. Because they are smaller, independent record companies are reluctant to invest in commercially
unproven artists.
25. Independent labels produce only about 2 percent of all recordings.
26. The music industry—especially major labels—finally embraced the MP3 format by supporting
iTunes.
27. Recording artists receive more than half of the price of a $1.29 iTunes download.
28. Artists receive a performance royalty when one of their songs is played on the radio.
29. Songwriters and publishers receive a mechanical royalty when they allow one of their
copyrighted songs to be recorded.
Multiple Choice
Note: The correct answer is asterisked.
30. A major difference between sound recordings made by Emile Berliner and those made by
Thomas Edison was that
31. The invention of _______________ paved the way for digital recording.
32. Under the compromise reached by CBS and RCA in 1953, singles were released on the _____
format.
33. In the 1950s, disc jockey Alan Freed, who coined the term rock and roll, attempted to make
rhythm-and-blues music more acceptable to mainstream audiences by
34. The turning point that led to the end of major record labels employing white performers to cover
black rock-and-roll artists’ songs occurred with which event?
35. Which of the following moral and cultural boundaries did rock and roll not blur in the 1950s?
36. Which of the following large corporations is not one of the major firms controlling national and
international music distribution?
37. In the 1950s, authorities began censoring rock lyrics because of concerns about what?
38. Music revenue since 2000 is
A. Increasing
Fill in the Blank
39. Before rock and roll, the music industry distinguished pop charts, which featured mostly white
music, from R&B, or __________, charts, which featured mostly black music.
40. Pop vocalists like ___________ in the 1940s were among the first singers to win the hearts of a
large national teen audience.
41. Music talent scouts, or _____________, discover, develop, and sometimes manage performers.
42. A(n) _____________ recording is made by capturing the fluctuations of the original sound
waves and storing those signals on records or cassettes as a continuous stream of magnetism.
43. In the 1940s, ______________ originated as magnetized strands of ribbon.
44. In the 1950s, songs recorded or performed by musicians who did not originally write or perform
the music, called _______________, was an attempt by white producers and artists to capitalize
on popular songs by blacks.
45. ________________ is a style of music that emerged to defy the professional, polished, and
often unpoliticized world of soul music.
46. _________ is an advanced type of audio compression that reduces file size.
Essay
47. Briefly explain how rock and roll muddied the waters of the American cultural landscape in the
1950s.
48. Why did cover music figure so prominently in the development of rock and roll and the
recording industry in the 1950s?
49. Why did hip-hop and punk rock emerge as significant musical forms in the late 1970s and
1980s? What do their developmental paths have in common, and how are they different?
50. What has been the impact of digital media on the recording industry?