Empire of Dirt. Wendy Fonarow
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highest chart placement and how many weeks it stayed there. In the United States, industry personnel evaluate a band’s success primarily in terms of “units” sold. While both of these criteria are indications of success, neither is an accurate evaluation of the profitability of a release. The bottom line is the amount of income from records sold, less the company investment in the project. These two disparate assessment strategies are pervasive in everyday verbal interchange. In London, industry personnel will say, “We got that single to number two,” whereas in the music capitals of Los Angeles and New York, industry personnel will say, “We’re at one and a half million units,” though they may have only sold 300,000, using shipping figures rather than sales figures in order to hype the success of a release to their colleagues. Thus, charting in Britain is the dominant dialogic gauge of a band’s success.
Within the British music industry, having a single in the Top 40 is perceived to be an essential component of a band’s success.10 Historically, Britain had few media outlets for music and few radio stations that played contemporary music. Until the 1960s, there were only four national radio stations, supplemented by a meager number of stations broadcasting to local regions and a varying number of pirate broadcasters.11 The BBC’s Radio One was the chief national media outlet for contemporary popular music. Radio Two played music that was characterized as more “middle of the road” (Hunter 1977: 130). Radio Three played classical, and Radio Four featured news, current affairs, and dramas. Since Radio One’s daytime playlist consisted primarily of songs that charted in the Top 40, this chart showing was deemed to be decisive for a band to gain national radio exposure.12 This connection between chart position and media exposure was further augmented by the national television program Top of the Pops, a weekly show featuring artists with top-ranking singles performing live or lip-syncing their current hit. Thus, a single charting within the Top 40 would result in both national radio airplay and national television exposure, making the chart a key focal point for marketing strategies.
Getting a single to chart nationally is still seen as so crucial to a band’s success that most major record companies plan to lose money on singles and treat the endeavor of releasing a single as part of the promotional expense for an album’s release. Singles are sold to shops in bulk deals, “Buy one, get one free” or “Buy one, get four free,” so that the new single will be on sale in retail outlets in an attempt to bolster a band’s presence in the national charts.13 Hence, it is far more likely that a new single will be on sale in retail outlets rather than older singles, which are not promoted to achieve chart placement. The fact that companies are willing to give away their product in order to get a single to rank in the national chart demonstrates the importance placed on a chart ranking in marketing a musical group.
Before the institutionalization of an independent chart, the national chart was the only chart that enabled one to get airplay and national exposure. The method of reckoning national chart placement played a significant role in the perceived need to establish a separate independent chart. In the mid-1970s, during the development of an independent chart, there were far fewer chart return shops and an inefficient system for accounting sales.14 In 1977 there were 750 chart return shops in Britain, with 250 outlets recording their sales for the singles chart and 450 outlets recording their sales for the album chart. The UK charts were compiled from data on purchases made at selected outlets of major chain stores such as WHSmith and Woolworths, which also sell a broad variety of other goods, as well as from some of the megastores, such as Virgin, HMV, and Tower, which primarily sell music. Up until the mid-1970s, the weekly press was not yet specialized. Instead, it covered a broad range of music, with sections for various genres, such as blues, jazz, and folk. Music purchases made at small, independently owned specialty record shops such as Rough Trade and Rock On in London, Edinburgh’s Avalanche, or Liverpool’s Probe, were excluded from the chart altogether. These specialty record shops catered to a collector’s market and carried older recordings and more obscure releases. Additionally, with so few retail outlets controlling the charts in an industry in which the names and locations of chart return shops were widely known, record hyping was rampant. Record hyping occurs when vested interests—a record company or a band’s management—go to chart return shops and purchase a large number of an artist’s single to bolster its position in the charts.15 The combination of hyping and the lack of chart return coverage of the independent stores meant that the buying proclivities of specialized customers were excluded from participation in the national charts.
National charts were featured prominently in all of the music papers. In October 1975 Sounds, which was considered by many to be the most adventurous of the three weekly music papers, replaced their Capital Radio chart with an “Alternative” chart.16 This chart was a straw poll listing the top-selling records at a selected independent retail shop. These chart lists were very informal and not necessarily accurate reports of sales. Often it was information made up on the spot by the owner or the clerk who answered the phone. The first week’s Alternative chart was a reggae chart supplied by Intone Records from Peckham, London. The Alternative chart would cycle through various genres, such as country, oldies, West African, and writers’ picks. Ironically, it was the oldies chart, which came from stores with a large number of resale records, that featured some of the newest acts, such as the Stooges, who would become prominent in the burgeoning punk scene.
An “independent” chart debuted in the pages of NME in October 1979.17 The weekly began to call selected independent retail outlets such as Flyover Records or Rough Trade to get a list of the top-selling releases at each record store.18 Hence, the independent chart was designed to reflect the purchasing habits of those who patronized the independent specialty shop rather than the large chain establishments. Until June 1996 the independent chart listed in Melody Maker was still put together from a straw poll of a chain of independent specialty record shops called the Subterranean chain, affiliated with Southern Distribution. After June 1996 Melody Maker switched to the music industry’s official independent chart using scanned data.
The industry followed suit with the magazine Record Business, establishing its own independent chart using the criteria of independent distribution. David Cavanagh attributes the impulse to create an official industry Independent chart to the owner of the independent label Cherry Red, Iain McNay (Cavanagh 2000). This official chart appeared in Record Business in January 1980. To understand why the industry selected distribution as the key factor in determining independence, one needs to look back to the development of the independent sector. Independent companies have been a constant since the inception of recording technologies. The history of independent labels is often traced back to the postwar years of the 1950s, when small independent labels proliferated in the patronage of rock and roll. However, the current crop of British independent labels have their strongest genealogical roots in the period of punk of the mid- to late 1970s, when small labels were set up under the auspices of punk’s DIY manifesto.
During the punk period, many bands set up their own labels to record and release their material. Punk’s rallying call of “do it yourself” was translated into the practices of these new labels: “do it simple,” “do it quick,” and “do it cheap.” For example, the Chiswick label recorded and manufactured 2,500 copies of an EP for £700 in 1977 (Laing 1985: 10).19 The band the Desperate Bicycles produced a single where the entire venture, including studio time, mastering, and pressing five hundred copies, came to £153.15 (Melody Maker, August 20, 1977). In the late 1970s key independent labels such as Fast Product, Rough Trade, Postcard, Zoo Records, Stiff, Factory, Mute, Beggars Banquet, Some Bizzare, Cherry Red, and Fiction were established in the musical wake of punk.
However, while recording could be done rather easily and cheaply, the biggest obstacle for nascent labels was securing a mode of distribution to get their records into shops for people to purchase. Some small labels obtained distribution deals with one of the major corporations. However, this had many drawbacks, including the loss of control over their release schedules. As often as not, it resulted in the label losing its separate identity and appearing to become a mere satellite for the larger corporate label. As Geoff Travis of Rough Trade said in an interview with David Hesmondhalgh in 1992: “The thing to do is to get your own distribution network, then you’ve got control, you’ve got power. You can decide with musicians