When Dick Clark died earlier this week, he was best known as a “New Year’s Eve Icon” from his hosting the annual televising of the Times Square celebration, but he came to prominence earlier as the host of two ground-breaking TV shows, American Bandstand, which aired weekday afternoons and introduced baby boomer teenagers to new records by showing Philadelphia teenagers dancing to the latest releases, and the New York-based Dick Clark Show, which put rock ‘n’ roll performers in front of screaming teenagers for half an hour every Saturday night.
Dick Clark’s success rested upon a change in music distribution platform around 1958 to a new technical standard: the mass-produced 45 rpm vinyl record, smaller and cheaper than the 78 rpm singles that were the previous market standard.
The adapter allowed the 45 rpm record to fit on the narrow record player spindle used for 33 rpm albums and the older 78 rpm singles format.
The popularity of American Bandstand reflected the attraction of the reproducible music experience. Kids could watch the show and then go out and buy the same record and try out the same dance steps. Programming the show and the radio top 40 programs that also proliferated at this time was cheap because the record companies wanted their music played — in fact there were scandals over payola — bribes to disk jockeys to favor songs in order to increase sales. The focus on the repeatable, recorded song rather than the original, variable performance made lip-syncing a big draw as well. The advent of disk jockey radio led to a standardization of the length of recorded songs at 3 minutes.
In these ways the changes in the inscription technology and transmission arrangements within the record industry led to new genres of television and radio programming, which in turn influenced the record formats. The standards also introduced the opportunity for creative transgression, such as longer songs like the Beatles’ “Hey Jude.”
The televised dance show was a standard genre for awhile – a kind of early reality TV – and that allowed it to focus public attention and to serve as a reference point for disruptive social changes. When teenagers started doing the Twist instead of the Lindy on American Bandstand it was a startling and exciting sign of a new sexual openness. When Alan Freed included Negro couples on his local New York dance show in the late 1950s, it represented a different vision of American social life than the images of all-white Philadelphia teenagers on Bandstand. And when Bandstand itself began including black teenagers it was a part of the nation’s collective witness to the change in cultural values brought about by the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
Janet H. Murray 
Janet – Nice reflection on the intersection of technology and content, and Dick Clark. The 45 was of course introduced in 1949 as RCA Victor’s salvo in the “war of the speeds” against major rival Columbia (which introduced 33’s the previous year), and it surpassed the 78 as the single medium of choice earlier than 1958 – more like 1955 when rock & roll suddenly flooded the airwaves. By 1959 it was all over and the labels stopped issuing 78s altogether. But Clark and his ilk (Peter Potter, even Wink Martindale–who I met recently) celebrated youth culture, their music, their dances, their teenage stars. And their 45s. It’s hard to remember that before 1955 practically everyone on television was middle aged, wore suits and looked like your parents!
Did you know that Paul Whiteman had a Saturday night “TV Teen Club” on ABC from 1949-1954? How different it looked from Clark’s show!