Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music
Author(s): Suisman (Author)
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Publication Date: 7 May 2012
Edition: Illustrated
Language: English
Print length: 368 pages
ISBN-10: 0674064046
ISBN-13: 9780674064041
Book Description
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.
Editorial Reviews
Review
“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, 12th May 2009
” [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, 19th June 2009
About the Author
David Suisman is Associate Professor of History at the University of Delaware.
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