The music of the past shapes the music of the future. Music is constantly changing and evolving and inspiring others to go further and create their own unique style. Today, the most popular genres of music would probably be rap, pop, hip-hop, and rock. But what came before these genres? How were they created? What was the catalyst for our modern music revolution?

Race.

Now, a lot of people like to say race had nothing to do with it, that music is a race-free industry. They couldn’t be more wrong. Karl Hagstrom Miller published the book Segregating Sound in 2010, here he discusses the influence of past racialized genres in music. In an attempt to create a single genre to represent the Southern identity, the music industry made the Folk genre. They wanted a genre that was pure and untouched by modern society and in their search for the perfect source, the talents of marginal Black singers came to light.

As we discussed in class, the music industry was looking for a group on the outer edges of society. The community that fit the bill was rural African Americans in small towns or sharecrop workers. After the discovery of their target group, many weren’t happy. Racial discrimination was still rampant at the time and giving a Black person a chance to become famous could be seen as dangerous. But some record companies still went through with their plans, and thus the folk genre was born.

Not only was the folk genre initially owned by African Americans, the blues were too. Many Black artists had their work categorized into one of these two genres because it was the only place that they ‘belonged.’ As the popularity of Black music rose, white artists became inspired to create their own music based off of the African American genres.

On the music news site, Digital Music News, Paul Resnikoff published an article about how the music industry is still dominated by white men even though most of modern music was born from Black artists. Rock n’ Roll, rap, and pop were all developed from the African American blues, and the country genre came from the folk genre. Now, there are plenty of artists of color in the music industry producing songs of whichever genre they choose.

But the issue comes in when you look at the owners of the music industry. Resnikoff comments that he “can’t name one Black executive from Pandora, Live Nation, Apple, Spotify, AEG, or SXSW” – all major music producers. There might be a few African Americans leading the industry here and there, but they are nowhere near as well known and influential as the white people that create the face of the company. If African Americans have had such a huge influence on modern music culture, why are Black executives being erased from the public view?

The only answer that I can personally come up with to this question is deep, internalized racism in the music industry. White people still feel like they are the ones to own and control genres that they had no business in creating in the first place. It’s like someone on earth taking credit for Neil Armstrong’s moon landing. I can only hope that I can see the diversity in the music industry grow so we can hopefully see some awesome new content produced to inspire a new generation of artists.