'Frontline' goes flat warbling old song on music woes.(Suburban Living)(TV & Radio)

Byline: Ted Cox

The normally reliable PBS investigative series "Frontline" sinks its teeth into a juicy story with the episode "The Way the Music Died," about the crash in the recording industry over the last few years.

Yet, where "Frontline" has distinguished itself in the past by questioning everything, this time it doesn't question enough. Told from the inside rather than the outside, overly sympathetic rather than deeply skeptical, it lets a bunch of music-industry hacks moan about how the biz used to be great and now it stinks.

In that, it doesn't sink its teeth into the story so much as it just licks it and gums it a bit. Shortsighted and lacking in historical context, this "Frontline," airing at 9:30 p.m. Friday on WTTW Channel 11, sets everything up to serve its purpose, rather than investigating to find an untold story.

Admittedly, the music biz is in a bad way. As Billboard editor Melinda Newman points out, "There are about 30,000 albums released a year. Maybe a hundred are hits. Sales have fallen from $40 billion to $28 billion in just three years."

Yet, when Los Angeles radio music director Nic Harcourt complains, "It's a classic example of art and commerce colliding and nobody wins. It's just a train wreck," that flies in the face of common sense.

The music industry has always been driven by profit and commerce; its history is one of corporations trying to assert control over the marketplace and only occasionally being blindsided by breakouts that transform the business.

Rock 'n' roll itself, followed by the British invasion, punk, rap and grunge - all caught the music industry unawares, only to find the corporations scrambling to co-opt and control the changes.

'Twas ever thus, so while it's amusing to hear David Crosby say, "The people who run record companies now wouldn't know a song if it flew up their nose and died," it's not exactly anything new.

Still, there's no use denying things are worse now than ever before, thanks to corporate consolidation and Internet file sharing. What's disappointing is the tired way "Frontline" tells that tale and how it misses some obvious connections.

First, writer-director Michael Kirk introduces a viewer to Sarah Hudson, the daughter of Mark Hudson, a yeoman best known for the short-lived "The Hudson Brothers Show" back in the mid-'70s. To hear him talk about how "success" on a TV variety show ruined his career is a hoot.

Anyway, Sarah Hudson is meant to depict "integrity" in the music biz, as she's trying to make it with a new album, "Girl on the Verge" (as in, "I'm a girl on the verge on a nervous breakdown").

It's a formulaic Cyndi Lauper rip-off, but it's supposed to be something more, with one bizzer proclaiming, "I think this song is an anthem for women of all ages."

As silly as that is, on the other hand there's an even sillier group: Velvet Revolver, the new amalgamation between the tattered remains of Guns N' Roses and Stone Temple Pilots. "Frontline" seems shocked - shocked - to discover that the industry actually wants to promote these old dinosaurs and expects them to succeed.

Allow me to point out that, back in 1977, acts like the Clash couldn't even get their albums released in the United States, because the music business was too busy ramming reformed supergroups like Crosby, Stills & Nash down listeners' throats. So, really, the story "Frontline" tells is as old as the business itself.

What's new is the extent of corporate consolidation - both in music and in radio - and the way the recording industry sowed its own seeds of destruction with the conversion to digital technology and compact discs. That format produced a temporary boom as listeners repurchased old favorite albums, but the digital sound proved easy to copy and distribute via computer MP3s. That's an irony "Frontline" never bothers to point out.

It also misses a chance to mention that the original rappers were reclaiming the history of pop music from the corporations. In the days before the industry reinstated control by reasserting songwriter copyrights, rap disc jockeys were the ones keeping the history of pop music vital, while corporations sat on back catalogs. But since that's going back 20 years, it's too far for "Frontline" to think about.

In the process, "Frontline" misses a great opportunity to discuss where an artistic industry goes after a corporate system collapses. Music is going through that process, as artists test new ways of distributing their music over the Internet, and publishing is about to go through the same cataclysmic changes.

Notice how book sales are following album sales in a downward spiral - a parallel that escapes "Frontline." Yet it could turn out that the death of the corporations actually produces more freedom, both for the artists and the audience.

In the end, yes, it's pathetic that retreads like Velvet Revolver have their careers handed to them - time and again. Yet Sarah Hudson is no great alternative. Better if "Frontline" had taken the time to track down a truly talented artist abandoned by the industry, like an Amy Rigby, or a group with true artistic integrity, like Sleater-Kinney.

That's the sort of intrepid work one has come to expect from "Frontline," not the same old song a viewer gets in "The Way the Music Died."