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In the 1970s the music industry further consolidated its power and once again sought to mass-produce music styles that had originally been highly individualistic. Corporate rock, the singer-songwriter genre, and slick varieties of soul and country-and-western music featuring glamorous superstars playing to massive crowds in sports arenas defined a new mainstream. Although a number of distinctive styles—disco, glam rock, punk rock, new wave, reggae, and funk—were pioneered by independent labels and marginalized musicians, the music of the 1970s is generally viewed as less individualized. The music industry became cautious due to a drop in sales of recorded music by almost $1 billion between 1978 and 1982 and a similarly precipitous decline in income from live concerts. A number of factors contributed to an economic revival in the music industry during the mid-1980s. The advent of the music video—marked by the debut in 1981 of Music Television (MTV), a 24-hour music video channel—and the introduction of the digitally recorded compact disc) in 1983 stimulated demand for popular music. The Album Thriller (1982) by Michael Jackson became the biggest-selling record in history up to that time, and it established a pattern by which record companies relied upon a few big hits to generate profits. The other big hits of the 1980s came from a new set of charismatic personalities, each of whom appealed to mass audiences by extending across traditional social boundaries. Popular musicians of this period include Bruce Springsteen, the working-class bar-band hero; Prince, whose 1984 single “When Doves Cry” was the first song in more than 20 years to top both the mainstream pop charts and the black music charts; and Madonna, the ambitious performer from a working-class background who remade herself as a pop icon. During the 1980s rap music entered into the popular mainstream. Pioneered by young African Americans in New York City in the late 1970s, rap combined long-standing black verbal traditions such as toasting (speaking over music) with the creative recycling of prerecorded material, later known as sampling. Although early rappers such as Afrika Bambaataa and Kool Herc were based in the borough of the Bronx, the first indication of the genre’s broader commercial potential was the single “Rapper’s Delight” (1979), recorded by the Harlem-based Sugarhill Gang. Rap artists such as Grandmaster Flash (“The Message,” 1982) and Public Enemy (It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, 1988) became popular while describing in stark terms the way of life in America’s minority-dominated inner cities. In 1986 Run-DMC and the Beastie Boys released the first multimillion-selling rap albums, featuring a mixture of rap and the guitar-based hard-rock music of bands such as Aerosmith and Led Zeppelin. MTV’s first show dedicated entirely to rap launched in 1988, and in 1990 pop rappers MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice set new sales records for the genre. By the end of the 20th century it had become almost impossible to discern the difference between the center and the periphery of American popular music. For one thing, the most economically successful popular music no longer featured a common ingredient or style. The best-selling recording artists of the 1990s included the adult-contemporary diva Mariah Carey, country-music superstar Garth Brooks, R&B vocal quartet Boyz II Men, “gangsta” rapper Snoop Doggy Dogg, venerable heavy-metal band Metallica, punk-influenced rock bands such as Nirvana and Red Hot Chili Peppers, teeny-bopper artists such as Britney Spears and *NSYNC, introspective singer-songwriter Alanis Morissette, and hugely popular soundtrack albums such as The Bodyguard (1993) and Titanic (1996). Older rock stars such as Carlos Santana, Elton John, and Aerosmith also scored big hits, and one of the biggest singles of the decade was a Latin novelty number called “Macarena,” a direct descendant of exotic dance records reaching back to the 1920s.