Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music

Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music

From Tin Pan Alley to grand opera, player-pianos to phonograph records, David Suisman’s Selling Sounds explores the rise of music as big business and the creation of a radically new musical culture. Around the turn of the twentieth century, music entrepreneurs laid the foundation for today’s vast industry, with new products, technologies, and commercial strategies to incorporate music into the daily rhythm of modern life. Popular songs filled the air with a new kind of musical pleasure, phonographs brought opera into the parlor, and celebrity performers like Enrico Caruso captivated the imagination of consumers from coast to coast. Selling Sounds uncovers the origins of the culture industry in music and chronicles how music ignited an auditory explosion that penetrated all aspects of society. It maps the growth of the music business across the social landscape―in homes, theaters, department stores, schools―and analyzes the effect of this development on everything from copyright law to the sensory environment. While music came to resemble other consumer goods, its distinct properties as sound ensured that its commercial growth and social impact would remain unique. Today, the music that surrounds us―from iPods to ring tones to Muzak―accompanies us everywhere from airports to grocery stores. The roots of this modern culture lie in the business of popular song, player-pianos, and phonographs of a century ago. Provocative, original, and lucidly written, Selling Sounds reveals the commercial architecture of America’s musical life. “This book is music to my ears-- a much needed history of the rise of the commercial music industry in the first decades of the twentieth century. Deeply researched, smartly argued, and engagingly written, Selling Sounds will sweep you off your feet.” ― Lizabeth Cohen, author of A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America “ Selling Sounds masterfully charts the rise of the modern music industry in all its commercial complexity. As engaging as the new popular music Suisman describes, his account deserves an audience as wide as that music enjoyed.” ― Emily Thompson, author of The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933 “Ranging from Tin Pan Alley song pluggers to Supreme Court decisions on copyright, from Caruso's Victor Red Seal records to Black Swan, the first major black-owned record company, David Suisman's Selling Sounds is a marvelous cultural history of the ways the music industry retuned the soundscape of modern times in the United States.” ― Michael Denning, Yale University “Virgin's music emporium will soon become a thing of the past: Like so many other retail music stores of late, it has announced that it is going out of business. The story of Selling Sounds , then, is especially timely.” ― Ken Emerson , Wall Street Journal “A fascinating, well-written, richly detailed story of how music became a commodity in America...[Suisman's] scholarship is amazingly wide-ranging.” ― William F. Gavin , Washington Times “[It's a] fascinating narrative that David Suisman unfurls...Here you learn everything from how the work of creating the songs is distributed to the various sales techniques employed by song pluggers (basically, the salesmen of music publishing), including the use of slides to add a visual component to the song. While there are numerous accounts of the position of so-called song pluggers in the development of popular music in the first decades of the 20th century, one rarely encounters a description that so accurately and compellingly details the quotidian life of these remarkable salesmen and the ways in which they learned to compete while peacefully coexisting...This [is a] really wonderful book. It warrants repeated readings and deep consideration. It is full of surprising revelations and some truly hilarious anecdotes. Well-researched and beautifully documented, replete with beautiful illustrations and photographs, this book belongs on the shelf of any reader serious about popular music and the music industry and given the impact of that industry on our daily lives, that really ought to be all of us.” ― Chadwick Jenkins , PopMatters “Suisman...tell[s] an alluring story.” ― George Anders , Forbes.com “A fascinating new book about the formative history of the American music business.” ― Matt Miller , The Deal Magazine “Inventors ran wild during the years bracketing the turn of the 20th century, creating technology that repeatedly transformed the ways people heard and consumed music. It happened again a hundred years later, which makes David Suisman's lucid account of the emergence and consolidation of the music industry particularly welcome.” ― Grant Alden , Wilson Quarterly “[A] meticulously researched history of [the music industry's] early days.” ― Mark Athitakis , Washington Post “Though the story Suisman tells is a broadly familiar o