Tariffs and British Music

I am an unapologetic fan of the British musical invasion of the 1960s. From early 1964 through much of 1967, British music dominated the American pop music charts. Leading the way was the legendary band the Beatles, but there were many other artists that made the oceanic jump with varying degrees of success. Artists like Petula Clark, the Animals, the Dave Clark Five, the Rolling Stones, Dusty Springfield, Herman’s Hermits, Peter and Gordon, Gerry and the Pacemakers, and Chad and Jeremy all had multiple hits over here that owed, at least a small part, to appearances on TV variety shows, most important among them the Ed Sullivan Show. But then something strange happened around in 1967. British acts as a wholesale phenomenon began to not do so well. Other than the superartists, radio played fewer and fewer British songs. It wouldn’t be until the early 1980s when British music would reinvade American airwaves. What happened?

In the 1970s, my parents told me that it was the U.S. recording industry that manipulated British music off the American scene in the late 1960s by pressuring Congress to impose stiffer tariffs on British music imports. It wasn’t just idle speculation on my parents’ part: they had actually seen a news story on TV explaining that. And it figures this way: I have a book that goes back to that 1960s period. Month-by-month, it lists the top-ranked songs for each the United States and Britain, on facing pages. And around 1967, a curious thing happened. Groups like Herman’s Hermits and the Hollies, who had been doing equally well on both sides of the Atlantic, suddenly were only charting high in Britain, and in the U.S. they charted low if at all. And groups like the Who and Pink Floyd, who were really coming in on their own at this time, had great difficulty getting their singles played and charted. Did American listeners’ tastes suddenly change like this? I seriously doubt it. But I’ve tried to research this tariff idea and so far I’ve come up with nothing. But I know that there is at least a kernel of truth somewhere. So I’m floating it out there in the blogosphere: do you know anything about this? Even as a kid back then, I could sense that something had changed, but I couldn’t put my finger on it until a few years later.