The rock and music pop scene were introduced to and gained popularity on television through massive hit shows for teenagers. The three primary ones were Where the Action Is on CBS, Shinding on ABC, and Hullabaloo on NBC. As more households had access to televisions along with the growth of widespread range of programming, including musical ones, the television played a significant role in distributing the music to the public. The bands that appeared on these hit TV shows went on to see significant success in the charts. The television shows helped to articulate the new sort of youth music culture and almost became a star-making mechanism in a relationship and profits that the music and television industries shared. Some bands, such as the Monkees, the American response to the Beatles, were created with the purpose of television performance as their acting and on-camera comfort as a group were initially prioritized over music. However, the Monkees’ music took off astronomically beyond anyone’s expectations. Nevertheless, they were a band groomed by the entertainment industry with an emphasis on television performances which took away much of the authenticity, even when compared to their counterparts The Beatles, who although made visual content, focused on their own music strongly (Covach and Flory 212).
Television drastically went on to change the landscape of the music industry. First, a split formed among artists and fans, with one side focusing on the pop-oriented, performance-focused television music, while the other, typically older audience was drawn to serious-minded music of rock which continued to be played on the radio rather than TV. Television also brought about the phenomenon of fictious bands, such as the popular Archies, a cartoon drawn band popular with young teens (Covach and Flory 214). This has never been done before and similarly created a new genre of music-television entertainment. However, until the advent of cable-network of television resulting in dedicated channels such as MTV, the television phenomenon in the 1960s had its limitations. Most TV sets at the time had poor audio and visual quality, and as recording and radio sound quality improved with hi-fi recording and FM, the disparities were noticeable. Television is not by nature of design a sound medium, and the musical experience is meant to be enveloping leading to the split in the fanbase, where younger audiences who generally cared less about sound quality appreciated the visual medium to their music (Frith 279).
Work Cited
Covach, John, and Andrew Flory. What’s That Sound? New York, W.W. Norton & Company, 2018.
Frith, Simon. “Look! Hear! The Uneasy Relationship of Music and Television.”Popular Music, vol. 21, no. 3, 2002, pp. 277–290.