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A history of the music industry : 1970's

The Grateful Dead producing the "Wall of Sound"

As the hippy era faded inevitably away and glam rock took hold, bands and artists concentrated more and more on getting their concert sound better as they were playing to bigger and bigger audiences.

By 1975 The Grateful Dead had produced their famous "Wall of Sound" at the San Francisco Cow Palace , incorporating separate systems for vocals, each of the guitars, piano and drums.

With the change into a new decade, a lot of the big technology developer's attention switched toward perfecting the cassette recording medium and launching into the whole new era of video cassette production.

In 1975 the battle to win the video wars began with the introduction of the Sony Betamax format. VHS video tapes soon followed in 1976 and the war for market dominance was on. Of course history reveals that VHS won the battle and the Betamax format soon died, much to the relief of confused customers bringing the wrong tapes home from those earliest video rental shops.

The Sony Walkman

Other great inventions of the 70s included the wonderful laser disc format. Like some shiny vinyl album that could play video it promised to finally end the battle over video formats in 1978. Inevitably, no-one bought it and the medium soon disappeared into obscurity.

A year later a considerably more popular and successful invention hit the market. Welcome the new Sony Walkman and a craze of sweatbanded joggers and cyclists hit the streets humming along to their favourite tunes, while the rest of us got annoyed listening to bad singing voices and muffled noise from the early headsets.

This simple invention took personal music listening out of the home and into the streets. Everywhere you went you could see people wondering around wearing their walkmans, a trend that still continues to this day, although the walkmans are now ipods, or other such devices and probably hold your entire music collection, the principle is pretty much the same!

And so another monumental decade of development in the music industry. As the 70s were drawing to a close, and with the popularisation of home video, the first promotional music videos were released the birth of the MTV generation was imminent.

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