[Dixielandjazz] "Selling Sounds" reviewed - The Commercial Revolution in American Music

[Robert Ringwald]

Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music." By David Suisman.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009. 356 pp. Photographs, notes, index.
Cloth, $29.95. ISBN: 978-0-67403337-5.
by Marc Stern
Business History Review, Summer 2010
David Suisman's fascinating new book maps the shifting soundscape of American life
between 1890 and 1940. During this half century, a "commercial revolution" transformed
the nation's music into product written, produced, and marketed to millions. That
the changes are far from finished is attested to by the iPods, MP3 downloads, YouTube
uploads, and file-sharing wars of our own day, and Suisman performs a great service
by analyzing the roots of this process.
"Selling Sounds" begins in the 1890s with the growth of a national commercial songwriting
system centered in New York's Tin Pan Alley. This hierarchical collective of mostly
white, male, disproportionately Jewish "publishers, composers, lyricists, arrangers,
pluggers, cover illustrators, and others" increasingly shaped the songs people listened
to, sang, played, and bought. Their "song factories" worked with popularity and profit
in mind. Industry representatives flogged ditties to music and department stores,
which played them for customers, in order to impress their tunes on into the consuming
public's awareness. They paid vaudevillians and band to showcase songs during shows
-- an early version of payola. Numerous genres, including dance numbers, marches,
racist minstrelsy, and ragtime, fell under the Alley's spell, and songwriters strove
to create art that would fit new commercial templates. A culture made more musical
through the introduction of relatively inexpensive and accessible instruments, including
player pianos, helped sustain this increasingly standardized system.
The profit motive encouraged imitation of successful offerings rather than radical
experimentation, and the industry cultivated a desire among consumers both for new
music and more of it. Local and traditional musical forms and songs competed against
this entity. Efforts to control prices throughout the industry fought competitive
impulses induced by low-cost, high-volume retailers. These conflicts led music publishers
to form their own chains, although their efforts failed to quiet competition.
Mechanized music produced for the phonograph and player piano expanded dramatically
in the early twentieth century. Phonographic disc formats helped shape the offerings
generated by Tin Pan Alley, turning people from creators of their own music into
listeners. Victor Red Seal recordings, designed for the company's gramophone and
marketed with the familiar brand logo of "his master's voice," brought high culture
to the masses through recordings of Enrico Caruso, the world's first recording celebrity.
Other "high" artists also recorded for Red Seal, and the label legitimized recorded
music. In so doing, it stimulated gramophone sales and "lower-class" recordings of
popular songs, spoken-word pieces, and sounds.
Control over sound rested with those who monopolized the legal rights to produce
and sell equipment, discs, and of course, the music itself. Patent and copyright
issues thus shaped the industry. Both the Copyright Act of 1909 and the U.S. Supreme
Court validated the songwriters' and publishers' claims to royalties for performance
and reproduction of their work through their trade organization, the American Society
of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP). The development of radio in the 1920s
quickly added licensing revenue to earnings derived from vaudeville, restaurants,
and movie houses. Performing artists were not included in these license agreements,
and they continue to battle for their share of the pie.
Led by Victor, the industry coached music-store owners, department-store salespeople,
and even general-store owners in how to market their products. The Voice of Victor
magazine was launched to diffuse best practices and to "standardize and professionalize"
sales, as well as to promote entrepreneurial zeal and managerial efficiency. Dealers
had to be taught how to both sell music machines and keep people buying discs. Efforts
to restrict price competition led to congressional hearings and antitrust actions
in 1917, even as the industry geared up to support the war effort in World War I.
A campaign to make musical education a civic imperative and expand it through recorded
music yielded the industry thousands of sales.
Although the music industry was, not surprisingly, white owned and run, African Americans
did work in it. The first African-American record label, Black Swan, emerged in 1921
as a challenge to the white monopoly and as a vehicle of "racial uplift." The label
produced recordings by many of the nation's black performers, although by 1923, when
it folded, it was featuring white artists as well. In its short existence, this undercapitalized
small label legitimated the African-American market and helped to promote jazz and
blues. Other firms quickly brought prominent black artists into their catalogs.
The new world of industrially constructed music was essentially in place by the Depression.
Indeed, that era saw the creation of music "to hear, not listen to" in the form of
Muzak. Mechanized recorded music, played on phonographs, jukeboxes, radios, and films,
paradoxically made musical sound ubiquitous while displacing musicians. Centralized
and vertically integrated firms, such as Victor, controlled increasing shares of
both U.S. and international markets.
David Suisman has produced a stellar study linking popular culture and business history.
Still, I would have welcomed tabular presentation of firm, industry, and production
trends over time, a bibliography (an omission that was undoubtedly the press's decision),
and a bit more historiographical placement in the several disciplines covered by
this study. Similarly, I would like to have seen a more quantitative analysis of
industry economics. For example, was Victor's greatest profit center in hardware
or software? In the gramophones or the discs? Or were these categories, unlike today,
coequal? During the years covered by the book, a revolution transformed the role
of sound and music throughout the nation. Local and precommercial music survived,
of course. In its earliest incarnation, for example, country music represented an
organic yet commercial regional response to national centralization. Nevertheless,
Americans learned to consume music as an increasingly standardized, mechanized, commercial
commodity that included Caruso, ragtime, and the blues, refrains of which can be
heard at the Web site identified in the epilogue.
__________
Marc Stern is professor of history and chair of the Department of History at Bentley
University in Waltham, Massachusetts. He is presently working on a history of the
fitness movement and fitness center industry from 1960 to 2000. He is a longtime
radio disc jockey and is the cohost of a weekly public affairs and popular culture
show on WMBR-FM in Cambridge, Massachusetts.


--Bob Ringwald
www.ringwald.com
Fulton Street Jazz Band
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