| In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, music became a mass-marketed commodity. Increasingly in these years, the music that people sang, heard, remembered, and purchased was mass produced by large-scale industries and, with the advent of the phonograph and player piano, was linked to technologies of mechanical reproduction. This dissertation analyzes the political economy of music to explain how and why music and the music business underwent this fundamental transformation. It argues that a number of shrewd and canny entrepreneurs employed powerful management techniques, innovative marketing, Taylorized production processes, and an abundant supply of musical talent to recreate music as a desirable and lucrative consumer good. Drawing on business records, trade magazines, sound recordings, oral histories, and advertisements, “The Sound of Money” shows how different sectors of the music industry developed economies of scale, applied a highly rationalized division of labor to their production, and brought professionalized mass production into the business of popular amusement. By the 1920s, the dissertation shows, these entrepreneurs' firms made music a central agent in the development of mass consumer society. Individual chapters focus on different enterprises, thematic developments, and sectors of the industry, including Tin Pan Alley song publishing, the Victor Talking Machine Company, the manufacture of music celebrities, and the racial politics of the first major black-owned record company, Black Swan Records. Together, these discrete elements of the industry's development provide an integrated survey of the process of commodification. For entrepreneurs, the transformation of music meant the rise of an enormous and influential international music economy. For consumers, the effects were more equivocal, leading, on the one hand, to more widespread musical access and education, while on the other, to increased penetration of rationalized capitalist management and production into the most intimate recesses of consumers' lives. |
