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CONSUMER FRIENDS STUDIO ENGINEER MUSICIANS PRODUCER RADIO PRINT TELEVISION PRESIDENT RECORD COMPANY ARTIST & REPERTOIRE MARKETING PROMOTION & ADVERTISING V.P. BUSINESS AFFAIRS DISTRIBUTOR RADIO STATIONS RECORD CLUB RACK JOBBERS ECORD STORE ONE-STOPS PROGRAM DIRECTOR LEASED LOCATIONS JUKE BOXES DISC JOCKEY CONSUMER CONSUMER CONSUMER enormously to the cost of music and at the same time exercises undue influence over the availability of musical styles. Bill Narum hard road ahead of him: “He practically has to go out and promote the record himself, create the demand for it, and then the radio station doesn’t want to play it because there is no local distribution and the retailer doesn’t want to buy it because he wants to be able to return it to an established distributor.” What Daily neglects to mention is that if an independently marketed, record doesn’t have , a proven market, then an established distributor isn’t interested in handling it, which leaves the independent in a Catch-22. But independent record production and manufacturing is a common and sometimes profitable way for an artist to expand beyond the local and regional audience syndrome and boost his personal appearance income. If he cannot immediately hook up with a major company, it still may be worth his time and money to produce a limited number of copies of a single or LP to use for promotion. Musicians making their own records have turned to the state’s five pressing plants in Arlington, Dallas, Houston and San Antonio. Although most of the plants’ production is tied to out-of-state orders, there is still a lot of homegrown gospel, country pop, educational and chicano music being pressed into vinyl in Texas. Radio The power of the radio broadcasting industry to mold the musical tastes of America cannot be overestimated. At the top of the pile are the FM and AM stations in the country’s top 50 audience markets. \(Most of these key operations are owned by large communications 8,000 stations present a variety of musical formats along these lines: country, 1,500; gospel, 1,000; album-oriented rock, Top 40 and pop \(which includes “easy listening” and “beautiful” music, make up the rest. Stations are bombarded with the more than 4,000 albums released each year. The resulting bottleneck varies in size, depending on station category and local conditions. But generally speaking, there is an incredible crunch of vinyl all around, with hundreds of new disks competing for a few minutes of time on the public airwaves. In merchandising, the apparent move is toward big record supermarkets and highly aggressive in-store promo. This trend will continue to concentrate retail control in a few hands and eliminate the “mom & pop” stores, but it is also the only factor working to hold down prices-at least until record retailing is securely in the grip of the most dominant store chains. THE TEXAS OBSERVER 7