The diversification of musical styles and techniques in narrative cinema from the 1950s onwards was partly caused by momentous changes in the film industry during that watershed decade, although these musical developments coincided with what in any case seemed set to have been a period of enhanced experimentation on the part of both directors and composers. Several trends from the 1950s were to have a lasting impact: the consolidation and expansion of existing orchestral scoring associated with the burgeoning of big-budget genres such as ancient and biblical epics; the growth of newer genres such as science-fiction and fantasy, both of which by their very nature demanded imaginative music that was out of the ordinary; a marked increase in relatively modern compositional techniques such as atonality, athematicism and non-functional harmony; and an enhanced public awareness of exactly how much a composer's individuality could add to the overall success of a film – a realization most strikingly to be seen in the critical appreciation of arguably the decade's most respected film composer, Bernard Herrmann. This was also the decade in which title- and theme-song sales were increasingly seen as an important source of additional revenue for studios, and in which up-to-date popular music began to feature in movies; with the advent of rock'n'roll, an emerging youth culture started to shape the tastes and preoccupations not only of American cinema, but of film-making across the globe (see Chapter 10). Many of these developments and shifts in emphasis were occasioned by the breakdown of the Hollywood studio system as it tried to come to terms with various technological, political and social changes taking place in the immediately post-war period.