Today's WSJ had this article in the cover of their Saturday Review Section.
I would post the whole article but do not want 'infringement' issues.
By Marc Myers (Nov. 5, 2021 10:58 am ET) Mr. Myers is a regular contributor to The Wall Street Journal and the author of “Rock Concert: An Oral History as Told by the Artists, Backstage Insiders and Fans Who Were There,” which will be published by Grove Press on Nov. 9. I have only put the first few paragraphs and hope you can view the remainder at the WSJ site (or do a google search for abovetopic+wsj)
"Once an engine of the counterculture, live music for teens (and former teens) is now mostly a lucrative diversion.
Seventy years ago, in the fall of 1951, a white Los Angeles disc jockey named Hunter Hancock hosted a series of rhythm & blues concerts that foreshadowed the modern rock concert. They were held at midnight at the city’s Olympic Auditorium, a 10,000-seat venue that stood at the intersection of several ethnic neighborhoods and was used mostly as a boxing and professional wrestling arena.
Hancock’s “Blues & Rhythm Midnight Matinee” concerts were noteworthy for two reasons. First, they were integrated, which was significant for L.A. and virtually all major venues in the country. Most U.S. cities at the dawn of the 1950s were segregated, either through laws, real estate covenants, aggressive police forces or intimidation. Second, one of the concerts was documented on a whim by Bob Willoughby, who would go on to become one of Hollywood’s top movie-still photographers. Earlier that evening, Willoughby was in his darkroom with the radio on when he heard Hancock hyping the event on his show.
“The idea of starting a concert at midnight was so intriguing I had to take my cameras and see what it was all about,” Willoughby told me in an interview a year before his death in 2009. For the first time, journalistic images not only captured the new music’s stage energy and flamboyance— including Big Jay McNeely playing the saxophone on his back—but also the awe and euphoria on fans’ faces. Teens clearly were swept away by what they saw and heard.
Hancock’s midnight revues and his string of West Coast R& B shows that followed were among the earliest concerts produced for the teen market. In the years that followed, R& B would expand to become rock ’n’ roll and then rock in the mid-1960s, before splintering into dozens of subcategories in the 1970s and beyond. By the end of 2019—just before the Covid-19 pandemic suspended the live-concert business— world concert-ticket revenue stood at $5.55 billion, according to Pollstar, a concert data collection service. Add the revenue from tens of thousands of related businesses, including concessions, marketing, concert technology, costumes, trucking, labor and security, and the industry is worth considerably more.
Though today’s concert business is more intricate, its roots can be traced back to the simpler days of R& B and rock ’n’ roll. While early R& B was initially designed as music with grown-up themes performed by young adults, rock ’n’ roll became the first form of popular music created exclusively for teens. Before the 1950s, America’s record industry didn’t care much what the youth market thought. No one did. Entire families listened together to a living-room radio or phonograph, and children could take it or leave it. Back then, most teens simply lacked sufficient funds to buy records and expensive players, and they didn’t yet have the power of numbers to influence the music industry or business in general. Instead, they listened to their parents’ music."....
I would post the whole article but do not want 'infringement' issues.
By Marc Myers (Nov. 5, 2021 10:58 am ET) Mr. Myers is a regular contributor to The Wall Street Journal and the author of “Rock Concert: An Oral History as Told by the Artists, Backstage Insiders and Fans Who Were There,” which will be published by Grove Press on Nov. 9. I have only put the first few paragraphs and hope you can view the remainder at the WSJ site (or do a google search for abovetopic+wsj)
"Once an engine of the counterculture, live music for teens (and former teens) is now mostly a lucrative diversion.
Seventy years ago, in the fall of 1951, a white Los Angeles disc jockey named Hunter Hancock hosted a series of rhythm & blues concerts that foreshadowed the modern rock concert. They were held at midnight at the city’s Olympic Auditorium, a 10,000-seat venue that stood at the intersection of several ethnic neighborhoods and was used mostly as a boxing and professional wrestling arena.
Hancock’s “Blues & Rhythm Midnight Matinee” concerts were noteworthy for two reasons. First, they were integrated, which was significant for L.A. and virtually all major venues in the country. Most U.S. cities at the dawn of the 1950s were segregated, either through laws, real estate covenants, aggressive police forces or intimidation. Second, one of the concerts was documented on a whim by Bob Willoughby, who would go on to become one of Hollywood’s top movie-still photographers. Earlier that evening, Willoughby was in his darkroom with the radio on when he heard Hancock hyping the event on his show.
“The idea of starting a concert at midnight was so intriguing I had to take my cameras and see what it was all about,” Willoughby told me in an interview a year before his death in 2009. For the first time, journalistic images not only captured the new music’s stage energy and flamboyance— including Big Jay McNeely playing the saxophone on his back—but also the awe and euphoria on fans’ faces. Teens clearly were swept away by what they saw and heard.
Hancock’s midnight revues and his string of West Coast R& B shows that followed were among the earliest concerts produced for the teen market. In the years that followed, R& B would expand to become rock ’n’ roll and then rock in the mid-1960s, before splintering into dozens of subcategories in the 1970s and beyond. By the end of 2019—just before the Covid-19 pandemic suspended the live-concert business— world concert-ticket revenue stood at $5.55 billion, according to Pollstar, a concert data collection service. Add the revenue from tens of thousands of related businesses, including concessions, marketing, concert technology, costumes, trucking, labor and security, and the industry is worth considerably more.
Though today’s concert business is more intricate, its roots can be traced back to the simpler days of R& B and rock ’n’ roll. While early R& B was initially designed as music with grown-up themes performed by young adults, rock ’n’ roll became the first form of popular music created exclusively for teens. Before the 1950s, America’s record industry didn’t care much what the youth market thought. No one did. Entire families listened together to a living-room radio or phonograph, and children could take it or leave it. Back then, most teens simply lacked sufficient funds to buy records and expensive players, and they didn’t yet have the power of numbers to influence the music industry or business in general. Instead, they listened to their parents’ music."....
