All That Music, and Nothing to Listen To

THE GOOD TIMES HAVE stopped rolling for the music business. Since 1994, sales of recorded music have been flat, ending a decade of double-digit growth. And suddenly, everyone has an explanation for what has gone wrong. We're in a trough between trends, goes one refrain; grunge, gangsta rap and alternative rock have all been played out, and their successors haven't surfaced yet from their undergrounds. When the next big thing arrives -- a new dance music permutation? trip-hop with tunes? unsentimental country-rock? reworked 1970's soul? -- the music business may pull through, or so it hopes.

Another hypothesis: The ''kids'' under 30, the most active and volatile market, have such short attention spans that they're hardly interested in follow-up albums by groups they loved just a year ago. They're preoccupied with movies, video games, the Internet, ''The X-Files.'' And another: Nobody's catering to the baby boomers, a big chunk of the population but one that's now assumed to be terminally nostalgic or simply uninterested in new tunes. Of course, there's the old favorite complaint: radio stations and MTV aren't giving enough tunes a chance to be heard.

There's a sociopolitical explanation, too. The polarizing Reagan years nurtured rude, extreme styles, like thrash metal, gangsta rap and the punk-rock groundswell of the early 1990's. The youth audience was galvanized. But the Clinton era of wishy-washy centrism and wan optimism gives youthful rebellion no fixed target. Anger and shock value still help albums zoom up the charts (ask Tool, Marilyn Manson or Rage Against the Machine), but they don't have any staying power.

Then again, neither do most other albums. In 1996, rock and pop had no sure things: not Hootie and the Blowfish, not Pearl Jam, not Sheryl Crow, not R.E.M., not Phil Collins. Serious fans bought the albums as soon as they were released, but then interest dissipated. The broader audience was unmoved.

With a few notable exceptions, the mass public -- the occasional buyers who turn albums into multimillion sellers -- has apparently lost any continuing commitment to performers. The problem, in the short run, is that too few albums have broad long-term appeal. Performers satisfy their core followings but offer little to outsiders. . But the industry's trouble may run deeper than the latest fluctuations in creativity.

The music business seems to have been working almost systematically to turn passionate devotees into apathetic consumers. The genres that dominated the first part of the 1990's depend on listeners willing to immerse themselves in a performer's obsessions: to penetrate the guitar noise and piece together the oblique lyrics of alternative rock or to visualize the cinematic exploits that rappers describe. It's music of antiheroes and heroes; if listeners don't identify with the music, then they have little reason to invest time or money in it.

Perversely, recording companies worked to convince the public that all those tortured or superhuman characters were interchangeable. In the 1990's, people with business backgrounds took over recording companies from a previous generation of music barons; the older generation wasn't always ethical, but its magnates were close to the music they sold.

The new corporate heads have applied business logic to an illogical business. They believe that if a product is disposable, a consumer will rush to replace it. They assume that if something sells well this year, it can sell better next year; if there's a popular product, an imitation will also find buyers; if a little exposure helps, a lot of exposure will help more.

Music merchants and radio stations have studiously subdivided the market, and there are eager, cult-size followings for everything from the jam-rock of Phish to the quick-strumming pep talks of Ani DiFranco to the razor-wired trip-hop of Tricky. But it's getting harder to put Humpty Dumpty together again, to form the consumer coalition that makes a multimillion seller. Music sellers can't persuade the mass of nonbelievers to pay attention.

And here's the post-punk 1990's twist: cultists aren't exactly proselytizing. They've seen what happened when alternative rock and punk rock became marketing categories instead of shared secrets: shows crowded with indifferent listeners and pressure on musicians to keep selling big. The music changes; often, it suffers.

SOME OF THE COMMERCIAL letdowns of 1996, like the albums by R.E.M. (which had just signed a reported $80 million contract) and Pearl Jam, are the result of deliberate choices. Both bands grew more introspective, turning away from the big guitar riffs of their hits, acting not like pop hacks but like artists. That, theoretically, is what musicians are supposed to do, though in practice it's not appreciated much.

Others, like Hootie, just outstayed their welcomes; too much exposure built a backlash. For the moment, female anger is marketable, with unstoppable sales of No Doubt (peppy, resilient anger) and Alanis Morissette (moody, eruptive anger). But their albums were released in 1995; the sequels will measure whether or not young women are any more faithful fans than the public at large.

Selling music like laundry detergent brings short-term results. Through the 1990's, grunge imitators like Bush and Stone Temple Pilots sold well for an album or two, while hip-hop was quickly flooded with ''studio gangstas'' endlessly rewriting the collected works of N.W.A. By 1996, the imitators had devalued their chosen genres, robbing them of even the illusion of sincerity. Another grunge growler? Another alternative-rock whiner? Been there, heard that.

What could be more artificial than a song half-noticed in a movie? The top 10 of 1996 was awash in movie soundtracks containing a few heavily promoted hits and a lot of filler. They gave entertainment conglomerates a chance to brag about the synergy of music promoting movies promoting music, but they didn't provide much identification with the performer. Most soundtrack hits are novelty hits, not career builders.

Novelties are also what many new alternative-rock bands have been reduced to after indiscriminate mid-1990's signings. In the past, a bewildered music business was a fruitful one, as in the mid-1960's and the New Wave late 1970's, when innovative and off-the-wall musicians got a chance because no one was sure of their commercial prospects. The alternative-rock rush has been less thrilling because now, bands are supposed to pay off instantly.

Alternative rockers who used to be happy packing clubs on the college circuit are expected to rack up national sales. That means coming up with a song that radio stations and MTV will select.

Often, it's a novelty ditty, like ''Popular'' by Nada Surf -- remember it? -- and if a band can't come up with more than one, there are multitudes of others jostling for position. While recording companies complain about the fickleness of radio stations and MTV, they don't stand by bands without hits.

One-hit wonders, movie tie-ins and imitators crowding originators have all been part of the recording business for decades. So is the practice, on the upswing again, of making albums as singles plus filler. But the big growth in the music business was in the album era, when rock musicians started to see themselves as something more than suppliers of ephemeral hit singles.

The album era coincided with the coming of age of baby boomers, and it's possible that it was a one-generation phenomenon, a blip in the longer history of popular music. If so, it's the blip that built the industry, which is geared to selling albums; frequently, labels withdraw a single from stores just as it peaks, so consumers who want the song have to buy the whole album. While hits still make million sellers, true blockbuster albums are more than the sum of their singles. In a strange way, the business is circling back to its 1950's attitudes, demoting music back to mere entertainment yet charging CD prices.

The stagnation of 1996 isn't as dramatic as the plunge of 1979. Back then, record companies started pumping out interchangeable, disposable disco hits, and consumers decided to hear them on the radio instead of buying them.

Now the music business markets to more niches, hedging against any single style's decline in popularity. But to pull out of its 1979 tailspin, the music business had two lucky breaks. One was the the switch to CD's, which meant that many people bought old albums for a second time, a source of income that is now running out. The second was the arrival of MTV, a marketing powerhouse.

NOW HITS ARE marketed to a fare-thee-well, with diminishing returns. And the eventual technological overhaul will be the distribution of music as digital information, from the Internet or elsewhere, rather than on plastic or tape. Digital transmission could serve increasingly diverse musical tastes, since it won't matter whether a tangible CD is available at the local mall; it could be an opportunity to reach all the microniches. But it's not likely to be a pretext for jacking up prices.

This time, the music business is going to have to recover the hard way. First, it has to find and nurture music that attracts genuine, loyal audiences, even if that takes some time. (If the audiences are cult-size, companies are going to have to lower budgets to match sales expectations, as they should have learned from the grass-roots scale of alternative rock, hip-hop and dance music.) And then -- with or without radio stations, movies or MTV -- it will have to convince potential listeners that the music could change their lives.