Search Results

This chapter defines what makes up the media and entertainment industries in the economy, and how that has grown in size and importance over the past half century. It includes book publishing, magazine publishing, newspapers, radio, television, music recording, game and toy producers, and photography. It concludes with a discussion of the general patterns of adoption of computer applications by these industries, including use of the Internet.

Cultural stereotypes in the United States constrained the involvement of immigrants with recorded music while simultaneously opening limited avenues of opportunity, especially for those from continental European nations. Just as Victorian tradition considered females particularly musical and, therefore, apt consumers of recorded music, so it taught that Europeans had invented and most skillfully developed the traditions of concert hall music that had been grafted onto the American artistic life. The phonograph industry therefore quickly turned to recording “foreign” concert hall vocal artists from Europe. Surprisingly enough, this colonial attitude eventually led the recording industry to a variety of multiculturalism dominated by European musical traditions. The importation into America of “foreign records” by European artists became a regular practice of the recording industry, interrupted (but not ended) by the two world wars. A second, culturally distinct, ethnic recording concept accelerated during World War I: that of recording for American ethnic customers the music of European immigrant musicians living in the United States.

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.

Reimagining the historical influence of the phonograph and recorded music in American life this chapter begins with a reconsideration of Evan Eisenberg's description of domestic consumer phonograph culture. Eisenberg imagined domestic interactions of Americans with the phonograph as “ceremonies of a solitary”, ritualistic observances in which the listener summons forth the sound of voices and musical instruments of his or her own choosing. The talking machine fragmented the unifying role of live music in late 19th-century social rituals. This chapter compares two different but interrelated patterns of listeners' reaction to phonograph records in the United States between 1890 and 1945. The first circle of popular resonance to phonographic sound emerges from the analysis of responses by a group of 2,644 Americans who filled out a survey undertaken in 1921 by Thomas A. Edison Inc. The second pattern of phonographic culture—circles of jazz resonance—first emerged at about the same time, flourished in tension with Edison's consumers, and died in the depression, only to be revived once it was over.

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”.

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.

The public history of the early phonograph business echoes with the sounds of its male inventors, entrepreneurs, and recording artists. From the crusty phonograph patriarch, Thomas Edison himself, all eyebrows and blunt curmudgeonly wisdom, to the rugged globe-hopping of Frederick Gaisberg and the big game and fly rod heroics of recorded sound tycoon Eldridge Reeves Johnson, the phonograph industry catered to male consumers, so resoundingly engraved on the vocal recordings of Enrico Caruso. The industry's growing involvement in music for domestic consumption made the phonograph into a medium for the expression of evolving female gender roles in the United States. Many American women's lives began to change in the early 20th century and women, defined as the primary audience for recorded music, responded in unforeseen ways to the recording industry's efforts to further shape their lives of domestic submission. American women quickly adopted the talking machine into their lives, as record consumers, often as retailers, and occasionally as recording artists.

The history of the phonograph clearly demonstrates important ways in which economic and cultural forces have shaped technological inventions in the world. In 1877, Thomas Edison invented the first functioning prototype of the phonograph, but others subsequently patented major improvements and, in the process, reinvented and reconstructed the phonograph and means of recording sound. In some ways, phonograph technology did determine the broad outlines of sound recording from the popular music in the 1890s to opera in the 1910s. All of the great pioneers of the phonograph industry—Thomas A. Edison; Emile Berliner, inventor of the flat disc; Edward Easton; and Eldridge Reeves Johnson, founder and director of the Victor Talking Machine Company—agreed that their invention should become a permanent part of every American home. The Victor Talking Machine Company reinforced the upper and middle levels of an American musical hierarchy in recorded music. This aesthetic stance influenced the initial desire to make records abroad and the subsequent program of recording within the United States for sale to this country's immigrants.

This chapter discusses music recording and the marketing process that follows. It explores the sudden interest in Ayacuchano music, and the patterns of recording and distribution of Andean commercial music. The chapter focuses on the role of the record label Dolby JR in making contemporary Ayacuchano huayno successful in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s.

This chapter discusses the successes experienced by Starday Records during the mid 1960s. Despite the tragedies that struck country music in 1964—the death of Cowboy Copas, Patsy Cline, and Hawkshaw Hawkins—the genre still enjoyed a great deal of fame all over the U.S. In its surge of popularity, Starday stood as one of the biggest trendsetters in country music. The chapter relates how Starday further increased its financial success by creating the Country Music Record Club of America, an exclusive club that sells country music records directly to fans and collectors on a mail-ordered basis.

Although recorded music revenue has collapsed since the explosion of file sharing, results elsewhere suggest that the quality of new music has not suffered. One possible explanation is that digitization has allowed more firms to bring music to market using lower-cost methods of production, distribution, and promotion. Forces increasing the number of products released may allow consumers to discover more appealing choices if they can sift through the offerings. Digitization has promoted Internet radio and online music reviewers, providing alternatives to radio airplay as means for new product discovery. To explore this, the author assembles data on new music released between 1980 and 2010, and on particular albums’ sales, airplay on traditional and Internet radio, and album reviews at Metacritic since 2000. He documents that the total quantity of new albums released annually has increased sharply since 2000, driven by independent labels and purely digital products. Second, increased availability has been accompanied by reduced concentration of sales in the top albums. Third, new information channels change the number and kinds of products about which consumers have information. Fourth, more albums find commercial success without substantial traditional airplay. Finally, independent label albums account for a growing share of commercially successful albums.

According to Walter Pater the absorbing qualities of music’s formal perfection mean that ‘all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.’ In her remarkable not-quite-kunstlerroman, The Song of the Lark (1915), Willa Cather responds to the notion that opera might be an ‘absolute art form’ by formulating a notion of the omnipresence of partial (rather than utter) absorption. Wherever her characters turn, their experiences are always composites. In articulating that alternative way of understanding art’s teleology, Cather also rethought the virtues and dangers of opera as a platonic artform, and posed a series of fascinating questions about prose’s relationship to the formal claim lodged by both live and recorded music. Cather’s early novels are a significant site to explore the ways in which the complex modernist textual experiments of the 1910s are shaped by live opera’s afterglow—a European cultural telos Cather both reveres and distrusts. But the chapter also proposes that Cather is making sense of a new sonic universe in which recorded music, in grooves or over the airwaves, comes to demarcate a kind of reproduction that serves both as type and antitype of the novel’s own formal aspirations.

This chapter explores the possibilities and limits of studying expressiveness in recorded popular music from an empirical perspective. Research into performance expression has tended to treat the recording as a documentary trace of a performance event. In popular music, where the recording most often is the “event,” such an approach raises questions about how expression might operate in this context. This chapter offers two analyses that highlight complementary conceptions of expression—first, an expressive performance premised on an aesthetic of naturalism which bears the trace of human variability (Adele’s soul-influenced vocal performance of “Someone Like You”), revealing similarities to performance expression in classical and romantic genres, and secondly, the role of studio production in creating expressive performances, exemplified by a hip-hop track (Kanye West’s performance of “Stronger”), premised upon a “post-human” aesthetic that combines human and machine-like performance. The discussion highlights the cultural specificity of models of performance expression.

In the early history of recorded music, concerns over fair compensation led to a long history of confrontation between industry and musicians. This chapter examines the case of the American Federation of Musicians’ 1942 ban on recorded music in the United States. The ban resulted from the social tensions wrought by new music-recording technology. The ban was a result of union leaders working to protect their musician and engineer members, whose livelihood they believed was under threat from music recording advances. In addition to outlining the dynamics surrounding the ban, the chapter reviews its wider implications, which include the creation of new music genres as well as the expansion of the recording industry. Although the recording industry did erode opportunities for traveling musicians, recording also resulted in the diversification of the music industry.

Once Clifford Brown had begun his career in music recording, there would never be a time in his life when musicians did not press to perform with him. The plane had hardly touched the tarmac upon his return from Europe when the phone started ringing. This was mainly a response to the Blue Note recording he had done before the Hampton tour. After freelancing around New York for a couple of weeks and checking out the scene, Brown heard that Art Blakey had called with news of a new group that he was forming. Together with the Blue Note Records producers, Blakey had convinced Lou Donaldson to join his band. Brown immediately accepted Blakey's offer to join him because he knew that the music would be to his liking and he had had a good experience with the Blue Note people. Blakey had also signed on veteran bassist Curly Russell and a budding piano talent who had scored well the year before with Stan Getz. His name was Horace Silver.

In 1952, Clifford Brown met someone with the unlikely name of Tadley Ewing Peake Dameron. Born in Cleveland in 1917, Dameron had written arrangements for Dizzy Gillespie's big band, and his major orchestra piece, “Soul-phony”, was premiered by the band at a Carnegie Hall concert in 1948. That same year, Dameron led a group in New York that featured Fats Navarro. In 1952, he was involved with various groups in the New York–Philadelphia area and had become an important figure for jazz record producers. In the last weeks of May 1953, Brown became suddenly more active on the bebop scene. He was being besieged by leaders to record and appear with them, but it was Dameron's band that interested him the most. A recording date with Dameron's band was scheduled for June 11. Meanwhile, altoist Lou Donaldson, under contract to Blue Note Records, had long sought out Brown for a record date, slated for June in New York.

The month of August 1954 brought about the flowering of the Clifford Brown-Max Roach Quintet. With the personnel complete and Brown's new compositions in place, the time was ripe to record the new group and to develop plans for touring with it. With unbounded energy, the musicians launched into the recording studio. There would be seven sessions (including the second Pacific Jazz date) in less than two weeks. On Monday, August 2, the band walked into Capitol Recording Studios at EmArcy Records and recorded three tunes. The next morning, the quintet recorded Duke Jordan's “Jordu”, which has since become a jazz standard. The melody is harmonized with Brown and Harold Land. Richie Powell has an opportunity to play without the horns in a trio cut of “I'll String Along with You”. Before he left the group, Sonny Stitt had worked out an interesting approach to “I Get a Kick Out of You”. During the short breaks between recording dates and jam sessions, Brown finally had time to share with LaRue Anderson.