SIMON FRITH .sx ANGLO-AMERICA AND ITS DISCONTENTS .sx I .sx I started writing this paper during the early stages of the fight for the leadership of the Conservative Party which led so unexpectedly to the demise of Margaret Thatcher .sx What was already clear was that the Tories were split on attitudes to Europe and that these , in turn , reflected attitudes to the USA .sx To put it crudely , the pro-Europeans , like Michael Heseltine , were implicitly anti-American , while those who believed in 'the special relationship' , like Mrs Thatcher , were explicitly anti-European .sx This is not the place to explore these arguments further ( or the way they were complicated by the Gulf War ) , but they did reflect a broader British anxiety .sx Is our identity essentially linguistic , reaching across the Atlantic to North America and the Caribbean , south to the old colonies , to Australia , South Africa , to India and Hong Kong ?sx Or are we all Europeans now , part of a free market that is set to expand East , our Island status finally sacrificed to the Channel Tunnel ?sx From a pop fan's perspective this question may seem silly .sx Contemporary popular music , rock , is Anglo-American ; the language of success is English .sx And , whatever I may say , musicians in France and Japan , Brazil and the Philippines , Finland and Zaire know where musical power lies .sx Even so , as an Anglo , I'm not convinced that the Anglo-American domination of worldwide popular music is as extensive or secure as it seems .sx To begin with , 'Anglo-American' music is a relatively recent invention , dating from 1963-4 and the rise of The Beatles .sx Before then Britain was just as insignificant and derivative a nation in pop terms as any other European country .sx Our Elvis Presley , Cliff Richard , was no more important outside Britain ( and the Commonwealth ) than France's Elvis Presley , Johnny Halliday , was outside France ( and the French colonies ) or than Italy's Elvis Presley , Little Tony , outside Italy .sx Young British listeners then were dependent for rock and roll sounds on Radio Luxembourg , and the British music industry agitated volubly for protectionist measures :sx guaranteed airplay for British records and British songs ; exclusion of touring American musicians to protect the livelihood of the locals .sx In tracing the global progress of 'Rock Around the Clock' , say , or the Twist , we would find no particular reason for singling out their British impact .sx My first question , then , is , if there was a time before Anglo-American pop , couldn't there also be a time after it ?sx The peculiarity of the post-Beatles situation is also indicated by a brief look at other media .sx International book publishing could be characterized , analogously , as Anglo-American ; international magazine publishing could not - publishing giants from Spain and Germany dominate both continental Europe and sectors of the British market .sx The global market for films and television programmes is American rather than Anglo-American ; British film policy has long been organized , unsuccessfully , around the defence of the British film industry ; the export of British television remains largely restricted to 'quality' shows .sx Even more strikingly , the world's most played and watched game , Association football , has little appeal in the USA , while its national sports , American football and baseball , are not much watched anywhere else .sx In short , Anglo-Americanism isn't an inevitable description of mass global culture , even in those media in which a shared language is at a premium .sx The USA dominates the worldwide film and television industries because of its market size and the economies of scale :sx its producers can cover their production costs domestically and undercut any other producers internationally .sx And its market dominance has enabled it to exercise cultural dominance too - not simply in the spoken language on the screen , but in visual and narrative terms too .sx What has come to be seen as film and television entertainment - in terms of genre and spectacle and pace - was defined by Hollywood studio conventions and American cinemagoers' tastes .sx Why didn't this happen in music too ?sx Within the industry itself , two reasons are usually given for Britain's importance in international music-making :sx first , the UK is a talent pool ; second , it is a test market .sx My second question is whether either of these situations is permanent .sx Britain became a pop talent pool in the 1960s and 1970s for a variety of local reasons to do with the peculiar characteristics of its musicians in terms of youth culture and education , but also because of our long familiarity with American song forms and song language ( though there was nothing inevitable about this - Britain has not produced more jazz musicians than other European countries , for example) .sx By the 1980s though , just as convincing 'American' musicians were emerging from Sweden and Australia , form Germany and Iceland , and the rise of 'world music' is a reminder that these days successful Western pop can come from anywhere - in this case mostly via Paris .sx Britain's uniqueness as a pop talent pool can no longer be taken for granted .sx Its importance as a test market is , equally , a matter of structural , historical circumstances ( a national monopoly broadcasting service , an influential music press , a music culture more marked by stylistic differences than by class or geographical mobility) .sx British pop norms were thus important when the international business thought in terms of youth and fashion ( and British singles sales were accurate indicators of future worldwide album sales and stardom ) ; they are less so for the pursuit of the yuppie demographic and the corporate tie-in .sx Since punk , British taste has , in fact , been decidedly erratic in international terms ( the 'second British invasion' of the USA , in the early days of MTV , simply reflected a brief moment of revived teen marketing) .sx These days record companies are as likely to use the 'grown-up' Dutch market as the British youth market as their testing ground .sx The irony of this situation is that it was Britain's rise to importance as talent pool and test market that changed the conditions of musical production and consumption that gave it that importance in the first place .sx The immediate business effect of Britain's American impact in the mid - sixties was the invasion of London by American A&R and marketing teams ; by the end of the decade Britain's leading musical 'exports' were being sold by non-British companies .sx Twenty years on , EMI remains Britain's only major label , and the seventies rock independents , like Island , have been absorbed by foreign companies ( even Virgin Records is now dependent on Japanese investment) .sx In the music business , then , 'Anglo-American' describes a particular historical period and conceals a greater dependence of the Anglo on the American than the order of the terms might suggest .sx At the same time , the usual snootiness about European rock conceals a much longer history in which British musicians have been part of a European ( rather than American ) music world .sx The Beatles , after all , survived as a group ( and forged the style that made them famous ) playing clubs in Germany , and all 'alternative' British musicians since , from the progressive rockers like Soft Machine and Henry Cow at the end of the 1960s to the punk and indie bands of the 1970s and 1980s have been dependent for their bedrock income on European clubs , European broadcasters , European festivals , and European audiences .sx The history of British club music has , similarly , from the 'discotheques' of the 1960s to 1980s Hi-NRG , Balearic beat and acid house , been the history of a European phenomenon , even if one dependent for its sounds on Black American musicians .sx There are obvious economic reasons why , for a young band or little label , Europe is a better market than the USA :sx it is nearer , more compact , and more familiar in its promotional institutions .sx Even such an obviously Anglo-American form as heavy metal , for example , now has a European identity ( to which British bands must subscribe ) - a touring circuit , radio and TV shows , a German-based magazine ( with English and Spanish editions ) , a pool of musicians who all sound the same whether they're from Germany or Sweden , Britain or , now , Eastern Europe .sx As it becomes harder for any group or record company to cover production and promotion costs on British sales alone , so it becomes necessary for all British bands to go for international sales from the start , and Europe is not only nearer than the USA , these days it also generates more music income .sx The 1980s deregulation of European broadcasting , for instance , led to a huge rise in the demand for music programming , whether in the form of videos , studio appearances or concert footage , and late eighties pop groups like the Pet Shop Boys or Bananarama planned their marketing strategy accordingly .sx What we have here is less a new invasion of Europe by British pop than the development of European pop institutions ( commercial music TV and radio , teen magazines ) to go alongside the well-established European rock institutions .sx British musicians and entrepreneurs are key players in these institutions but they are not British institutions .sx Thus Britain's most significant radio deejay , John Peel ( who began his career in the 1960s as a British voice in Texas ) is now effectively a Euro deejay .sx He broadcasts weekly for both Finnish radio and Hilversum , and his BBC World Service show is probably now more important promotionally than his Radio 1 programmes .sx These days he includes more European than American sounds in his playlist .sx From this perspective , 1992 ( the year the European Community becomes a free-trade area , taking down the final barriers to the flow of goods , services and labour , harmonizing the various national laws on licensing and copy-right ) marks the logical end of a process , rather than a beginning .sx Production is already centralized in pan-European terms - most 'British' records , tapes and CDs and all British record sleeves are now manufactured in France or Germany .sx As for taste ( using the charts for a moment as its basic measure ) , British consumers already have more in common with their European neighbours than with the USA , at least in terms of new music .sx 'Anglo-American' , one might conclude , is just another name for 'classic' rock .sx II What are the implications of this for national and international pop ?sx The first thing we need to do is rethink what is meant by a 'major' record company .sx In the last decade there have been two significant changes in the international music business :sx first , the USA is no longer economically dominant - RCA's absorption into the German publishing company , BMG ( the Bertelsmann Group ) , and Sony's takeover of CBS , leaves WEA ( now Time-Warner ) as the only American 'giant' ( the others are both European - Britain's Thorn EMI , and the Dutch Polygram ) ; second , this takeover activity ( also reflected in internal restructurings and lower-level deals like the Mitsushita purchase of MCA ) marks a recomposition of the hardware/software relationship .sx As both the pace of technological change and the consumer boom in domestic electronic goods slow down , so ownership of the software ( the films and music ) becomes more desirable .sx The digital-recording age has reached the stage the electrical-recording age reached in the 1960s .sx Two points follow from this , one conceptual , one methodological .sx Conceptually we can no longer sensibly define the international music market in nationalistic terms , with some countries ( the USA , the UK ) imposing their culture on others .sx This does not describe the cultural consequences of the new multinationals :sx whose culture do Sony-CBS and BMG-RCA represent ?sx Methodologically , we can no longer measure the multinational penetration of national cultures with statistics of personal consumption .sx ( How many records sold in each country ?sx On which labels ?sx With which artists ?sx ) The basic unreliability of these figures , particularly in smaller ( and/or pirate-ridden ) markets distorts the picture in the majors' favour ( their sales are more likely to be reported ) and , anyway , as their income base shifts from primary to secondary rights ownership , so record sales cease to be the best measure of even their success .sx Measuring national music success is equally problematic , and a simple reference to record labels is certainly inadequate .sx One effect of the digital 'revolution' in recording ( another aspect of the changing relationship between hard and software ) has been to transform the grounds of 'local' production :sx what Paul Th e berge has characterized as a " universalization of sound " means that music can sound the same ( share the global acoustic ) wherever it comes from ; what once were 'demos' are now to all intents and purposes 'finished' products .sx