1950 |
- Jac Holzman founds Elektra in New York to promote new folk and jazz musicians
- Les Baxter's Music Out of the Moon incorporates exotic themes in instrumental music
- The first major rhythm'n'blues festival is held in Los Angeles (the "Blues & Rhythm Jubilee")
- Dutch electronics giant Philips enters the recording business
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1951 |
- The white Cleveland disc jockey Alan Freed decides to speculate on the success of Leo Mintz's store and starts a radio program, "Moondog Rock'n'Roll Party", that broadcasts black music to an audience of white teenagers
- The first rock and roll record, Ike Turner's Rocket 88, is released ⇐
- The first juke-box that plays 45 RPM records is introduced
- Karlheinz Stockhausen joins the school of music at Darmstadt and begins composing "elektronische musik" ⇐
- The French national radio sets up a studio to record electronic music in Paris and the West Deutsche Radio creates a similar studio in Cologne (the NWDR)
- John Cage composes music for radio frequencies
- Howling Wolf and Joe Turner popularize the "shouters"
- Victor and Columbia agree to split the record market: Victor sells 33 RPM long-playing records and Columbia sells 45 RPM records
- Gunter Lee Carr cuts the dance novelty We're Gonna Rock
- Leo Fender introduces an electric bass
- The first Jamaican studio opens and begins recording "mento" music
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1952 |
- Bill Haley forms the Comets, the first rock and roll band
- Louis and Bebe Barron's soundtrack for the science-fiction film The Bells of Atlantis uses only electronic instruments
- The Weavers, accused of being communists, are forced to dissolve
- Bob Horn's "Bandstand" tv program airs from Philadeplhia every weekday afternoon
- John-Clellon Holmes coins the expression "beat generation" to refer to Jack Kerouac and other young writers
- The Cleveland disc jockey Alan Freed (aka Moondog) organizes the first rock and roll concert, the "Moondog Coronation Ball"
- Oskar Sala invents the "Mixtur-Trautonium", an instrument capable of subharmonics
- John Cage composes multi-media pieces that use a computer
- John Cage's Williams Mix is an electronic collage of hundreds of random noises
- John Cage's Water Music (1952) instructs the performers to also perform non-musical gestures ⇐
- Gibson introduces its solid-body electric guitar, invented by Les Paul a few years earlier
- Roscoe Gordon, a Memphis pianist, invents the "ska" beat with No More Doggin'
- Sam Phillips founds Sun Records and declares "If I could find a white man who sings with the Negro feel, I'll make a million dollars"
- Electronic engineers Harry Olson and Herbert Belar create the first synthesizer at RCA's Princeton Laboratories, the Mark I
- Charles Brown's Hard Times is the first hit by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller to enter the charts
- The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is founded to represent the recording industry of the USA
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1953 |
- Bill Haley's Crazy Man Crazy is the first rock and roll song to enter the Billboard charts
- The Orioles' Crying in the Chapel is the first black hit to top the white pop charts
- Todd Matshikiza's musical Makhaliphile fuses classical, jazz and African music
- Sam Phillips records the first Elvis Presley record in his Sun studio of Memphis using two recorders to produce an effect of "slapback" audio delay
- Hank Williams dies at 30
- CBS launches a sub-label, Epic
- Delmark is founded by Bob Koester
- The black market constitutes 5.7% of the total American market for records
- Youstol Dispage releases his first record
- Vee-Jay is founded in Indiana, owned by a black couple and specializing in black music
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1954 |
- Boom of doo-wop
- Bill Haley's version of "Rock Around The clock" is the first rock song used in a movie soundtrack
- Joe Turner cuts the blues novelty Shake Rattle And Roll
- The record companies switch from 78 RPMs to 45 RPMs
- EMI (Electrical and Musical Industries) buys Capitol
- The Country Music Disc Jockeys' Association (CMA) is founded in Nashville
- Japanese electronic company TTK (later Sony) introduces the world's first transistor radio
- The first Newport Jazz Festival is held, the first hazz festival in the world
- Edgar Varese pioneers tape music with Deserts
- Otto Luening's Fantasy In Space and Vladimir Ussachevsky's A Poem In Cycles And Bells pioneer "tape music" at Columbia University
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1955 |
- "Rebel Without A Cause" and "Blackboard Jungle" establish a new role model for teenagers, the rebellious loner and sometimes juvenile delinquent
- Frank Sinatra's In The Wee Small Hours (1955) is the first concept album of pop music
- Millett Morgan releases a recording of the Ionosphere
- Pete Seeger releases the first album of African music by a white musician, Bantu Choral Folk Songs
- Lonnie Donegan's Rock Island Line launches a new genre in Britain, "skiffle"
- Hungarian composer Georg Ligeti, while studying at Cologne, coins a "texture music" that has minimal movement
- Chuck Berry cuts his first rock and roll records, the first ones to have the guitar as the main instrument, and invents the descending pentatonic double-stops (the essence of rock guitar)
- Bo Diddley invents the "hambone" rhythm
- The Chordettes and the Chantels are the first girl-groups
- Ray Charles invents "soul" music with I Got A Woman, a secular adaptation of an old gospel ⇐
- Indian sarod player Ali Akbar Khan performs at the Museum of Modern Art of
- ABC-Paramount is founded in New York New York
- The magazine "Village Voice" is founded by Dan Wolf, Ed Fancher and Norman Mailer
- Ace Records is formed by Johnny Vincent in New Orleans, specializing in black music
- Charlie Parker dies at the age of 35
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1956 |
- Heartbreak Hotel starts Presley-mania
- The rock'n'roll music of white rockers is called "rockabilly" (rock + hillbilly)
- Screamin Jay Hawkins' I Put A Spell On You and his antics pioneers gothic rock ⇐
- Wanda Jackson is the "queen of rockabilly"
- The popularity of rock and roll causes the record industry to boom and allows independent labels to flourish
- Ska develops in Jamaica
- Martin Denny's Exotica invents a new genre
- Norman Granz founds Verve to promote alternative jazz musicians
- Elektra pioneers the "compilation" record, containing songs by different musicians
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1957 |
- Golden age of the teen-idols
- LaMonte Young composes music for sustained tones
- Max Mathews begins composing computer music at Bell Laboratories
- Lejaren Hiller writes a program for a computer to compose the Illiac Suite
- Bruno Maderna's Musica su Due Dimensioni is the first electroacoustic composition ⇐
- Harry Belafonte's Banana Boat launches "calypso"
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1958 |
- Link Wray's Rumble invents the "fuzz-tone" guitar sound
- Golden age of instrumental rock
- Eddie Cochran overdubs all instruments and vocals on Summertime Blues and C'mon Everybody
- The Kingstone Trio's Tom Dooley launches the folk revival
- Lowman Pauling uses guitar distortion and feedback on the Five Royales' The Slummer The Slum
- The film company Warner Brothers enters the recording business
- Big Bill Broonzy dies at 65
- RCA introduces the first stereo long-playing records
- Don Kirshner opens offices at the Brill Building
- The RIAA establishes a "gold" award for singles and albums which reach $1 million sales
- David Seville's The Witch Doctor and the Tokens' Tonite I Fell In Love are the first novelty hits
- Edgar Varese premieres his Poeme Electronique in a special pavilion designed by architect Le Corbusier, where the music reacts with the environment
- John Fahey invents "American primitivism"
- Bobby Freeman's Do You Wanna Dance begins the "dance craze"
- Antonio Carlos Jobim's Chega de Saudade coins bossanova ⇐
- The Columbia-Princeton studio is established in New York for avantgarde composers, with an RCA Mark II synthesizer
- Stax is founded in Memphis to promote black music
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1959 |
- Frank Zappa and Donald Van Vliet cut a record together
- Country-music star Marty Robbins records a concept album, Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs
- In Jamaica Theophilus Beckford cuts the first "ska" song, Easy Snapping
- Rick Hall founds the FAME studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama
- Puertorican dj Polito Vega starts broadcasting Latin music in New York
- The Drifters' There Goes My Baby introduces Latin rhythm into pop music
- Babatunde Olatunji's Drums of Passion introduces the USA to African polyrhythms
- The first Newport Folk Festival is held
- John Cage performs "live electronic music"
- LaMonte Young and others found the "Fluxus" movement
- Barry Gordy founds Tamla Motown in Detroit to release party-oriented soul records
- Chris Blackwell founds Island in Jamaica
- Raymond Scott invents the first sequencer, the "Wall of Sound"
- 600 million records are sold in the USA
- Buddy Holly dies at 22 in a plane crash
- Since 1955, the US market share of the four "majors" has dropped from 78% to 44%, while the market share of independent record companies increased from 22% to 56%
- Since 1955, the US market has increased from 213 million dollars to 603 million, and the market share of rock and roll has increased from 15.7% to 42.7%
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