Search Results

This chapter examines why the firms that introduced a type of recorded jazz that was successful switched to champion another type of jazz that was less successful. Using both qualitative historical and quantitative analyses, the chapter explores record company comparative advantage in the context of sociological congruence. It also considers the relationship between jazz, race, and Victorian-era firms. In particular, the chapter considers a key source of jazz's illegitimacy with respect to cultural elites: its association with African Americans. It shows that incumbents, after releasing the earliest jazz recordings (in 1917–1918), reoriented the production of jazz music to align with their identities as producers of symphonic music amid mounting elite anti-jazz sentiments.

This chapter examines the sociological congruence of record company deception. It explores deception through the lens of organizational role identities, where role identities are a function of when an organization was founded. It also discusses the role of pseudonyms by focusing on Victorian-era firms and the anti-jazz sentiments they faced. In particular, it considers the relationship of firm identities to the costs and success of highbrow versus lowbrow jazz recordings. The chapter shows that Victorian-era firms used deception to overcome two types of identity threats: their association with profitable but illegitimate types of jazz, and the actions of newer entrants that blurred the incumbents' identity.

The economic depression of the 1930s decimated the recording industry in the United States: hard times so undermined the phonograph companies that many never recovered. Victor and Columbia survived by merging with other media corporations. The Depression's long-term economic effects, combined with the development of new communication technologies, served to accelerate the expansion of a few leading recording companies into business conglomerates that supplied recorded music for movies, radio, and jukeboxes. These multimedia consolidations led to the simultaneous playing of a limited number of popular songs on movie sound tracks, radio broadcasts, and jukeboxe sounds, saturating the media with hit songs, overwhelming young and musically unformed Americans, and absorbing ethnic and race music traditions into popular music formulas. The hit record phenomenon, so often exaggerated by phonograph critics, highlights a fundamental process in popular recorded music in the United States and a phonographic paradox: the power of a particular musical performance diminishes with repeated listening.

More than we used to realize, the phonograph and recorded music served to stimulate collective memories among Americans of different social and ethnic backgrounds, who were, like the few large recording companies that survived the Depression, caught up in the swiftly changing patterns and politics of national life. The personal changes brought on by life itself provided ample stimulus for seeking solace in musical memories, but the additional burdens of national economic adversity and war, which drew workers into urban factories and GIs onto lonely battlefields, led many in both groups to long for the music they had left behind. Record producers often mixed stylistic genres and, less creatively, simply issued ethnic cover versions of hit records. Such processes of cultural and musical assimilation created another basis for shared popular musical memories. With bebop, as with 1920s jazz, blues, hillbilly music, and big band swing of the 1930s and 1940s, the recording industry mediated cultural and musical diversity in the United States.

In the early history of the phonograph and recorded music, if not in the minds and performance practices of all vernacular musicians, blues and hillbilly music should receive separate consideration; the recording industry rigidly distinguished between rural white and rural Black recorded music by creating and maintaining segregated recording and marketing categories. Making and replaying sound reproductions of what record producers first called “old familiar tunes”, “hill country tunes”, “old time music”, and, beginning in 1925, “hillbilly” music, swiftly intertwined supposedly rustic white southeastern American musicians with complex patterns of northern urban industrial commerce. Producing, recording, and consuming records of what passed for white rural southern music primarily served the economic interests of the northern recording companies that discovered remarkably little difficulty in harnessing southern entrepreneurial ambitions to their own corporate ends. Hillbilly records were born when northern and southern entrepreneurs began to envision how professionalized southern vernacular musicians would appeal when recorded and packaged as untutored rural southern mountaineers. Pioneer record producers like Ralph Peer liked to call their work in the South “recording expeditions”.

This chapter considers the relationship between Hinduism and the history of music recording in South India. It argues that over the first decades of the 20th century, the introduction and commercial success of the gramophone business was built around a series of constitutive relations with Hinduism. Record companies in South India not only drew upon Hindu musical traditions and performers, but they also used Hindu iconography to market their records and represent their business practices. Moreover, these companies produced records according to the Hindu ritual calendar, turned the studio recording sessions into places of worship, and sought to locate gramophone technology within a Hindu theology of sound.

From 1946 through 1954, Grecophon Record Company of Gary, Indiana issued the seldom recorded traditional Greek island music, or nisiotika, that had its American roots in Tarpon Springs Florida. Founded by Skevofylax (Steve) Zembillas, originally from Kalymnos, Greece, this small independent label eventually released a wide range of Greek music by popular Greek musicians and vocalists of the period.

Berlin became the center of the German phonograph industry. Odeon and Beka emerged as strong overseas record companies; the Carl Lindström Company became the industry giant that by 1914 had swallowed up these and other competitors. Germans understood the importance of cross-cultural communication for business, and this was an important reason for their success in global markets. The trade journal Phonographische Zeitschrift proclaimed its allegiance to high culture, a contrast to the indifference of its American counterpart, Talking Machine World. The German journal made space for Max Chop, a classically trained music critic, whose columns included comments on recordings of non-European music. He compared its strange effects to the contemporaneous challenges to harmony in the music of Richard Strauss, viewing both the foreign and domestic deviations as symptoms of musical decadence. Overall, the German and American comparison reveals educated German respect for high culture, and openness to its musical expressions from non-European countries, while Americans were receptive to a wider range of popular cultural expressions.

Clark Terry's Big Bad Band got distribution deals for some of their records. The band was packed with gigs. To manage his schedule, Clark set up an office in Manhattan and hired help. In order to stop losing money, he setup his own publishing business. Plagiarism threatened the band and its gigs and Clark turned no stone unturned to curb it. With Melba Liston and Phil Woods, Clark started Etoile Music Productions and a record company under the same name. Clark describes his ventures as a part of the Etoile Music Productions and the ups and downs of his business. His schedule was getting busier with endorsements, interviews etc. but jazz and the Big Bad Band remained Clark's first love. He even started going to local schools to teach kids about jazz. This experience, as Clark describes, was his introduction to the world of a whole new jazz perpetuation.

This chapter examines how collectors, listeners, and entrepreneurs took advantage of a legal gray zone—that composers deserved to benefit from recordings of their work but that record companies did not enjoy a copyright for their recordings—to rerelease old and out-of-print recordings, beginning in the 1930s. It considers how such activities landed bootleggers in court, often with indecisive results, and triggered a struggle for property rights. The chapter looks at the career of Eli Oberstein to illustrate the way some in the music business played fast and loose with sound recordings in the mid-twentieth century. It also explores the recording industry's lobbying to obtain federal copyright protection for its products, the issue of copying and distributing popular music, and the surge of bootlegging after World War II.

It was on February 15, 1970, that Clark Terry's Big Bad Band was to perform at the Carnegie Hall. The show was a hit, the audience gave it a standing ovation and Clark describes his feeling as being overwhelmed. This experience came with its own ups and downs for Clark. There was much money involved in the show. Clark also realized the nuances of the recording business and came to know that trying to get a record company pick an album was an extremely difficult task. Initially feeling low, Clark decided to continue fighting. The bright side was that the band was happy, and they had gotten paid. That standing ovation showed that the audience was happy. So Clark decided to keep stepping.

This chapter focuses on Joe Davis’s collaboration with Gennett Records. It explains that when Gennett returned to disc production in September 1944, Davis was given complete charge of selecting the talent and the songs to be recorded and listed, and would also be the exclusive selling and distribution agent for all records made by Gennett. During this time Davis also made several purchases of masters from various recording companies, and continued signing and nurturing new artists.

Kyriaki Yiortzi Antonopoulos was the first internationally successful Greek female vocalist who made North America her permanent home. Known simply as Madame Koula or Coula, this woman proved to be so popular that between 1916 to 1917 and 1927, she recorded at least 199 individual songs. No other female vocalist of Greek heritage in North America made or sold as many records during this same period.She sang in every genre, but was especially known for her songs in the café aman style, and she was the first Greek American vocalist to record in Turkish.She and her husband founded the Panhellenion Record Company in New York.

Chapter 2 with Chapter 1 focuses on the environment within Japanese modernity that is comprised of infrastructures in four spheres of activity— education, government, industry, and commerce--and, in the field of music, connectivities among them that afford composers opportunities. Chapter 2 investigates connectivities in all four spheres, including commercial music education offered by Yamaha, opportunities for composing and publishing new instructional material for domestically-produced instruments (especially pianos), and support for contemporary music through cultural facilities. Other support for composers includes includes the JASRAC copyrighting agency, recording companies (ALM Records, Fontec, Camerata), and private publishers (Zen-On, Ongaku no Tomosha).

This chapter continues analysis of the commercialization of Early Music through reference to three further sets of institutions and their respective discourses of value: the BBC (art), music clubs and festivals (folk), and record companies (commercial). TheBBCis shown to play a crucial role in incubating Early Musicin the early years of its development. William Glock’stop-down support for HIP (between 1960-73), coupled withtheties forged between Oxford-educated’scholar-performers’and the BBC’s music department,together constituted a distinctively enabling mix.Turning to Early Music’s links with the British folk revival we find music clubs and early music festivals providing an essential space for sharing HIP more widely. Though the record companies are often portrayed as only ‘jumping on the old band wagon’ once profitability was proved, the chapter outlinesa rather more complexpicture, highlightinganenlightened approach towards risk-taking by some of the industry’s key players.

This chapter discusses the story behind the creation of Starday Records. Starday records was established in 1952 when two local businessmen, Jack Starns and Harold W. Daily, decided to form a record label. It explains that Starns believed that a recording company was the only thing needed, as he had several artists lined up and songs ready to publish. It notes that the first Starday records were made at the ACA Recording Studios of the sound engineer Bill Holoford in 1953.

This chapter describes DJ Don Logan’s experiences with Shreveport radio and record companies from the late 1950s into the early 1970s. It Logan’s reflections on the symbiotic relationships between radio, record companies, and live performance; his discussion of Paula Records, particularly in relation to its artist John Fred and His Playboy Band; and his experience with radio station XERF, the Mexican/U.S. border station that employed him during the early 1960s.