A business built on singles
Until the mid-1960s the American record business revolved around the three-minute single. Labels chose songs, assigned producers, and often supplied the material, while Top 40 radio decided which records reached a mass audience. Albums were frequently built around one or two hits and some filler.
By 1967 this model was under pressure. The Beatles had stopped touring in August 1966 and were concentrating on studio work, and the release of the Sgt. Pepper album that June showed that an LP could be treated as a single artistic statement. Musicians elsewhere took note, and some began asking for more control over what they recorded.
What happened after Monterey
The Monterey International Pop Festival, held in June 1967, put a spotlight on bands that executives had previously paid little attention to. Some San Francisco groups had already been signed before the festival. The Jefferson Airplane had a deal with RCA, the Grateful Dead were with Warner Bros., and Big Brother and the Holding Company were on a small label before later moving to Columbia.
Afterwards the pace of signings picked up. Labels sent scouts to the Bay Area, and many bands received contracts that would have been unlikely a couple of years earlier. Capitol signed Quicksilver Messenger Service and the Steve Miller Band, the latter reportedly with an unusually large advance. Columbia heavily promoted Moby Grape, a San Francisco group whose first album arrived in mid-1967 with a large publicity effort that some critics thought excessive.
Not every signing worked. Many bands had built reputations as live performers and found it hard to capture their sound in a studio, where producers often wanted tidy, short tracks. The phrase San Francisco Sound became a marketing label for groups who had little in common apart from geography, which is a point worth remembering when looking at the period.
Album-oriented FM radio
Radio changed too. Most listening was on AM, where short, formatted playlists dominated. FM was widely regarded as a minor band, often carrying classical music or simulcasts of AM stations. In the mid-1960s US regulators moved to require some separate programming on commonly owned AM and FM stations in larger markets, which left room for new formats.
In San Francisco the disc jockey Tom Donahue and his colleagues began playing album tracks on KMPX in 1967, without a rigid playlist. Programmers chose songs by feel, and long tracks, folk, blues and new rock could sit side by side. The approach later became known as progressive or free-form radio, and it drew on the growing audience for FM radio.
The commercial importance was simple: if stations played album tracks, record companies could sell LPs to a young, loyal audience instead of relying on singles. Over the next few years more stations adopted similar formats, and the label differences among them gradually blurred into what later became album rock.
Artists asking for control
Another change was the growing expectation that performers should have a voice in their own records. Bands who wrote their own songs and played their own instruments, as the Beatles, Bob Dylan and many San Francisco acts did, were harder to treat as interchangeable. The Monkees’ dispute with their producers, resolved early in 1967 when they won more say over their music, drew attention to the issue from the pop end of the spectrum.
Control took different forms. Some artists negotiated for more studio time, others for the final say over song selection, sequencing and album artwork. These gains came gradually, and many contracts of the time still favoured the labels heavily.
New media around the music
The business also expanded around the records. Concert promoters such as Bill Graham ran venues that treated bands as headline acts. Poster artists became part of the marketing. In November 1967 the first issue of Rolling Stone magazine appeared in San Francisco, offering a place where albums could be reviewed seriously. Together these developments helped create a music press and an audience that cared about albums.
Limits and ironies
The relationship between counterculture and industry was uneasy. Many musicians distrusted corporate labels, yet needed them for distribution and funding. Some fans accused bands of selling out when they signed contracts, while labels were happy to market the idea of rebellion to the youth market.
Outcomes were uncertain. A number of the bands signed in 1967 had short commercial lives, while a few, such as the Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead, became durable acts. What lasted was less any individual contract than the idea that rock could be an album art form, supported by its own radio and press, and run with more input from the people making it.