gopher://gopher.igc.apc.org:70/00/headlines/38 /* Written 10:46 PM Dec 9, 1996 by labornews@igc.org in media.issues */ /* ---------- "WalMart Censors Music Industry" ---------- */ From: Institute for Global Communications November 12, 1996 Record Companies Remake Pop CDs to Win Over Wal-Mart By NEIL STRAUSS M URPHY, N.C. -- The CD rack at the Wal-Mart in this small town in southwestern North Carolina, like the racks in 2,300 other Wal-Mart branches around the country, is a world of shrink-wrapped packages marked "edited," "clean" and "sanitized for your protection." Other compact disks are not marked this way, but they have been altered from the original version available at most record stores. Some of the teen-agers shopping here say they are not happy about this. But they have no other choice: the closest record stores are 50 to 150 miles away in Gainesville, Ga., and Atlanta. "They blank out all the words they think are bad," Adam McLean, a 13-year-old from nearby Andrews, N.C., said about the albums he has bought at Wal-Mart. "I hate it. It doesn't sound the same." On other CDs he has bought at Wal-Mart, record companies have removed songs or altered artwork to make them acceptable to the discount chain, though Adam said he was not aware of it. Adam's mother, Arlene, said she did not like Wal-Mart's interference. "It should be my decision instead of theirs," she said. Not every parent agrees with her. One teen-ager here said that after he ordered "Incesticide," by Nirvana, in the mail, his stepmother saw the title, smashed the CD and told him he could buy records only at Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart is the single largest seller of pop music in the country, last year accounting for sales of an estimated 52 million of the 615 million compact disks sold in the United States. Its refusal to stock albums with lyrics or cover art that it finds objectionable has long been a frustration for some customers, musicians and record-industry executives. What is harder to spot, many in the music business say, is the way the discount chain's distribution decisions are directly affecting the production of music. Because of Wal-Mart's clout, record labels and bands will design new covers and booklets, drop songs from their albums, electronically mask objectionable words and even change lyrics in order to gain a place on Wal-Mart's shelves. But Wal-Mart is not alone, nor is music the only entertainment form affected. Retail chains that designate themselves as family stores, including Kmart and Blockbuster, are having a profound impact on pop culture. Like their counterparts in the music industry, film studios are recutting movies, removing scenes and changing video boxes, often without the director's consent, so that Blockbuster, the huge video chain, will put them on its shelves. "This is a new form of censorship that's come into being in this country," said Oliver Stone, whose director's cut of "Natural Born Killers" was banned by Blockbuster, Kmart and Wal-Mart. "Essentially, it's the sanitization of entertainment. Studios like Warner Brothers won't even release a film rated NC-17. They point to economic pressure from Blockbuster and Wal-Mart, who won't carry those videos. People don't understand how much power these corporations have." It's not just in rural areas that these companies exert influence. In larger cities, cost-cutting chains are forcing independent retailers out of business, making unaltered music and videos harder to find. In Charlotte, 200 miles from Murphy, eight out of 13 independent record stores have gone out of business in the last year. The reason, said Don Rosenberg, the owner of the Record Exchange in Charlotte, is because corporations like Wal-Mart, Target and Best Buy are undercutting their prices, selling CDs for little profit, no profit or even as loss leaders to lure customers. Independent video retailers sometimes buy films from Wal-Mart because the chain sells them cheaper than their distributor, said Bruce Apar of Video Business Magazine. "When you have somebody selling music who is not a music retailer, it changes the complexion of the business dramatically, especially when they control that much business," said Rosenberg of the Record Exchange. "So if you're an artist and you want to write something controversial about race, religion, politics or sex and you know it's not going to be carried by a large percentage of retailers, you're in the position of either singing what's on your mind or selling your records. The music industry is now hostage to a group of retailers that don't care a whit about music or the music industry." Though other discount chains have similar policies, music executives described Wal-Mart as the most powerful, unpredictable and unyielding. Responding to this assertion, Dale Ingram, the director of corporate relations at Wal-Mart, said: "Producers of music know upfront that Wal-Mart is not going to carry anything with a parental advisory on it, and that's something they're going to have to factor in when they produce the product. Our customers understand our music and video merchandising decisions are a common-sense attempt to provide the type of material they might want to purchase." The cover of John Mellencamp's new CD, "Mr. Happy-Go-Lucky," depicts Mellencamp surrounded by two children and a dog. In the background on either side of him are faded-out drawings of Jesus and a devil. At Wal-Mart, Jesus and the devil have been air-brushed out. Elsewhere in the discount chain racks, songs have been dropped from albums by Jackyl and Catherine Wheel, a Nirvana song title has been changed from "Rape Me" to "Waif Me," rap albums have the word "nigger" blacked out of their CD covers and music by White Zombie, 311, Type O Negative, Primitive Radio Gods, Beck, Outkast and dozens more have been altered to remove obscenities. Brad Sedderth, an 18-year-old from Murphy, said he returned a CD by the rapper Onyx after discovering that the beeped-out words interfered with his listening. Other albums he was looking for, including No. 1 albums by Tupac Shakur and Snoop Doggy Dogg, weren't available in the store because of Wal-Mart's chainwide policy not to carry any album affixed with the industry's standard "parental advisory" label denoting explicit lyrics. The decision to change an album in some way might be initiated by the record company, aware that a stickered album will not fly at Wal-Mart. Or it could come from one of the independent companies, like Handleman and Anderson, that do the entertainment buying for most discount chains. Or it could come from Wal-Mart's corporate offices in Bentonville, Ark. The soundtrack to the movie "Beavis and Butt-head Do America," for example, having cleared both its record label, Geffen, and Anderson was rejected by Wal-Mart because of a chainwide ban on Beavis and Butt-head merchandise. Blockbuster, which is run by Bill Fields, a former Wal-Mart executive, has similar policies. Its 4,500 outlets, which account for 25 to 30 percent of video rentals nationwide (a number expected to double in the next four years), are filled with movies in "rated," "unrated," "edited" and otherwise altered versions. The most often cited example of a film being changed for Blockbuster is "Showgirls," an NC-17 film that was re-edited by Paul Verhoeven, its director, to get an R rating. Nonetheless, Blockbuster, which stocks unrated and R-rated movies on a case-by-case basis, felt Verhoeven's R-rated version still did not meet the chain's standards, and further cuts had to be made. Lesser known examples of this range from B movies like "Sgt. Kabukiman," trimmed from an unrated to a PG-13 film for eventual distribution by the chain, to better-known films like "Wide Sargasso Sea," edited from an NC-17 rating to an R rating. Though the changes are always made by the studios that released the film, few directors have final approval. "Often times, editing changes are made without the film maker's knowledge," said Chuck Warn, a spokesman for the Directors Guild of America. "But the movie goes out with his or her name on it. It can be very damaging to someone's career." Jonathan Baskin, a spokesman for Blockbuster Entertainment, responded: "We respect the needs of families as well as individuals, and within that broad spectrum we try to maximize choice. The NC-17 or unrated films are such a small percentage of the broad selection we offer in our store. As a general rule, we support the artistic integrity of the films we carry." In the recording industry, bands are usually allowed to decide whether or not they want to make changes in their music or album packaging to meet a discount chain's standards. Wal-Mart recently chose not to carry Sheryl Crow's new album because of a lyric that accused the chain of selling guns to children. (Wal-Mart carries rifles, knives, handcuffs and handgun ammunition, though it says that nothing is sold in violation of government ordinances.) A spokesman for the record label that Ms. Crow records for, A&M, the chain asked the company to change the offending lyric not just on copies sold in Wal-Mart but in all copies of the album. (Ingram of Wal-Mart denied this, saying no attempt at negotiation was made with the label.) Ms. Crow decided not to remove the lyric. In the end, said Al Cafaro, the chairman of A&M, Ms. Crow sacrificed 10 percent of her sales. In most cases, the band goes along. "These are records that should be in chains like Wal-Mart and there aren't too many occasions when a band does not agree to make the change," said Jason Whittington, head of sales at Geffen. Andy Gould, the manager of White Zombie, a band on Geffen, said the group had changed its albums "very reluctantly" because its singer, Rob Zombie, "comes from a small town in Massachusetts and the only place he could ever buy records was Wal-Mart." In many cases, people buying altered videos and compact disks are not aware that they have been changed. Often when these products leave Wal-Mart and Kmart, they will circulate nearly undetected along with their unaltered counterparts in second-hand stores. Yet even when consumers understand that they are buying an altered version, they rarely know exactly what has been changed or deleted. "We're fighting for legislation in Congress to put through a new consumer protection law," Warn said. "It would force companies, including Blockbuster, to inform their customers that the product they are selling is different from the product that was available in theaters and to tell them how it is different." Some music and film executives say they are concerned about how these policies will affect the creation of music and films as a whole, not just the titles that are carried in "family-oriented" chains. Stone said he would think twice before directing a movie with explicit sexuality because of this. Other directors shoot different versions of the same scene for video or television versions of their movie. And several film distributors said that they rejected certain titles because they felt that they were too explicit for Blockbuster. Several record label presidents said they did not feel that Wal-Mart's policies influenced their decisions to record a band or release an album. But one talent scout, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said a band he worked with had left off a song with obscenities when choosing songs for its album so that it would not carry a parental advisory sticker. Nina Crowley, the executive director of the Massachusetts Music Industry Coalition, which has initiated a letter-writing campaign to Wal-Mart to protest its policy, recalled a recent experience she had at a local music conference. "I sat in rooms with hundreds of musicians who were very concerned with how to get airplay and how to get their CD in a store," she said. "And the fact that stores like Wal-Mart are deciding how music should sound is creating a chilling effect. Some of these kids are wondering if they are going to have to change what they do if they want to make any money."