Billboard, Melody Maker and Rhythm & Blues Melody Maker, published in the United Kingdom, was, according to its publisher IPC Media, the world's oldest weekly music newspaper. It was founded in 1926 as a magazine targeted at musicians; in 2000 it was merged into "long-standing rival" (and IPC Media sister publication) New Musical Express. As the commercial possibilities of a teenage readership became apparent, magazines such as Melody Maker began addressing a younger audience directly, offering a disturbed paternalism alongside the Top 20. In the wider social arena the war had emphasized the hypocrisy of participating ina crusade in the name of democracy and anti-racism, while at home blacks were the victims of systematic discrimination. Race riots in Detroit demonstrated the depths of black disaffection, but in the aftermath of the war blacks found that most of what little they had gained was transient. Black music was being more widely heard, but it was still produced and marketed principaliy for a black audience. Segregation not only remained an acceptable marketing strategy, it also enabled most of the companies to maintain a system of exploitation (tested by others in earlier years), under which the companies themselves assumed the rights, for a token fee, of the music recorded by black musicians. Nevertheless, in the 1950s black music once again provided the catalyst for change. In the century's recurrent musical cycle of challenge and compromise, the challenge was now stronger than ever and the eventual compromise involved an irreversible shift in the balance of the musical culture, and the society that supported it. Swing had appropriated elements of black jazz, but it had paid little heed to the blues. The blues tradition, meanwhile, had continued to develop a variety of styles "growing up to express the experience of a switch to urban life. Searching for a new catch-all term with which to sum up the various styles of contemporary black music in its now inappropriately named "race" chart, the magazine Billboard introduced the description "rhythm & blues" on 25 June 1949. This happy choice of phrase covered many varieties of music, from big band shouters and Chicago's updated Mississippi style to the "sepia Sinatras" of the West Coast's racially integrated bars. Two styles began to predominate in the early 1950s. "Jump bands" played small combo dance music derived from blues, with a boogie-woogie bass, rhythmically infectious and with an obligatory saxophone "break" halfway through. Vocal groups mixed strong gospel influences with a discernible pop song input. This music had a ghetto street-corner association, both for its musicians and for its audience of black urban youth. lts lyric content mixed adolescent emotion, often humorously treated, with sexual themes heavy with 'double entendre' . The growing number of radio stations catering to a black audience (270 by 1953) meant that rhythm & blues became the first undiluted black music to be readily available to those who were prepared to look for it. Those exploring the radio dials were very often teenagers. Their elders were by now listening to the radio less. The growing lure of television shared responsibility for this with the fact that network radio, with its reliance on safe mainstream white taste, was rapidly surrendering the airwaves to the independent stations, whose musical output was often beyond the understanding of many older listeners. Adult white musical tastes were increasingly being catered for by the newly arrived long-playing record or LP (originaliy developed by CBS in 1948); the equally new-fangled seven-inch 45rpm single (produced as a rival by RCA) seemed tailor-made to give the younger market its identity badge. The ending of the war brought a decline in the following of the big bands; this was partly because their music was associated with a prewar world which had gone, but an important contributory factor was a change in the laws requiring licences for public dancing. Black radio stations attracted considerable white teenage audiences, particularly in the South and on the West Coast. In 1952 one Los Angeles record store reported that 40 percent of its black music sales were to white audiences. The West Coast's tradition of mixed audiences allowed teenagers there to go beyond the first excitement of discovery into a region of experience that was often (as had been the case with jazz) spoken of in terms echoing religious conversion. But wherever white, particularly working-class, teenagers identified with rhythm & blues, a lifestyle rapidly grew up centered on same kind of outlaw or deviant status. Next Page: The Birth of Rock'n' Roll and Arrival of Elvis Presley More Content: Discovering the Teenagers Alan Freed: A Record Consultant The Birth of Rock'n Roll: Arrival of Elvis Presley Jukeboxes and Top 40 Programming