I’m not subscribing to the WSJ to read the story, but it’s a specious conclusion that some sort of tax caused the decline of BB music. Evolving tastes and teens with money who liked RnR a lot more than BBm probably caused it’s decline. There were still plenty of big bands around when I was a kid, but my parents never bought one stinking music album. In fact, they used to listen my Tijuana Brass albums. But few teens wanted to hear brassy music. They wanted to hear that rock and roll guitar a lot more.
No, there was a pretty long gap between the big-band craze and the rock-n-roll craze. The latter didn’t replace the former. There was indeed a huge cratering of big-bands in 1946, when both major bands and minor ones disbanded. Some of the milder bands (like Les Brown) generally seemed to survive a bit better, and ultimately lasted many decades, but at a much lower profile.
If you copy and paste the title into a search engine, a public access version will pop right up.
I think people with a subscription have a slightly different url so when they use it to post articles, we get the suscribe page.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323628804578348050712410108.html