DBWI: No Great Folk Music Shift

Back in the late 60s, the record companies were running scared. The new medium of cassette tapes, and the rising popularity of acoustical and folk music, were cutting into their sales in a big way. To simplify, the executives put on a massive push for the kind of music that required full-blown studios to record, culminating in what was meant to be the greatest rock music festival, indeed, the greatest music festival, in all of history: Woodstock. Every top rock bond and a quite a few second tier were booked for it, everything was planned, and the most incredible series of management bungles completely scuttled it. Inadequate hygienic facilities, inadequate food supply, non-existent ticketing, no real provision for parking. But the one thing that killed it as a rock festival was that the PA systems were somehow scheduled for setup ad teardown after the scheduled end of the festival. So the performers, arriving on the site and discovering the nearly complete lack of infrastructure (the stages were ready, but that was about it), mostly said, "Well, we've been paid, we have accommodations, we've got a venue, we've got audiences... we're going old-school." And Woodstock became the biggest folk music festival in history.

Rock pretty well died that day, or more accurately, studio rock died that day. After that demonstration of corporate incompetence, pretty well nobody was willing to renew any agreement with any group larger than a dozen or so people, not with solid state electronics getting ever cheaper and the needed equipment to start a decent recording setup going from "millions of dollars" to "a few tens of thousands," meaning a sound business plan and a good salesman could get a studio going. And of course, cassettes were vastly cheaper to make than vinyl. Vinyl's still around, thanks to the people who had the sense to rent out their pressing facilities, and of course these days, a studio only needs a recording chamber and good microphones, and a half-decent computer, and digital distribution is skyrocketing.

But what might the North American music industry look like if Woodstock had actually gone off something resembling as intended?

OOC: Woodstock really was a massive management disaster. About the the only things done right were the setting up of the stages and the PA systems.
 
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