Selling Sounds

this music is connected in some way with the commercial economy of the music industry, in which value is gauged according to financial, not cultural or aesthetic, criteria. Music may still have cultural or aesthetic value, but neither governs its commercial production.

In our own times it has become fashionable to declare that music has become a commodity. Like many truisms, this claim obscures as much as it reveals. It tells us nothing, for example, about how music resembles or differs from other commodities, or what aspect of music lies at the core of its commercial circulation. Does its value as a commodity inhere in the composition, the performance, or the sounds, or in some combination of these? To say merely that music is now a commodity tells us nothing about how, when, or why it became one, whether all music commodities function alike, or whether music that functions as a commodity at one moment is always so, uniformly. Commodification is not, however, an instantaneous occurrence, like the flash pasteurization of milk. It is a social and political process, populated by human actors, and one that includes various dimensions and phases. To understand what music commodities are and how they operate, we need to revisit the period when the wheels of commercial music began to turn.

At the turn of the twentieth century, a new musical culture emerged as the modern music industry took shape. This culture included many of the terms and conditions that structure the way we now understand and experience music, and its emergence had worldwide ramifications. The rise of music as big business was a multinational and transnational phenomenon, but one in which the United States had a leading position.

Stylistically, the emerging soundscape encompassed a vast musical range, from coon songs to opera. The result was that music in many ways came to be manufactured, marketed, and purchased like other consumer goods—in fixed, durable objects, available in dazzling, unprecedented variety and at a cost affordable to millions of consumers in all parts of the country. Paradoxically, however, music was also becoming dematerialized at the same time, severed from the tangible realm by the metaphysics of sound recording and by copyright law, which came to recognize property rights in music that were unconnected to physical forms.

By the Great Depression, the creation of a new musical culture was effectively complete, in two complementary respects. First, a transformation had been effected in musical forms and the technologies and practices of making music and as such created a new musical culture, in contrast to an older one. At the same time, there emerged a new musical culture, with more music everywhere, in contrast to a culture in which music was less prevalent, less prominent. On one level, this transformation marked a change in musical works and practices; on another, it signified the alteration of “a whole way of life,” in which music was now a presence in schools, in magazines, on the streets, and in commercial spaces as never before.

It was also integrated into other forms of the entertainment business, from vaudeville to radio. Music thus developed as a commodity in two distinct registers. In its primary markets music was produced, marketed, and sold directly to consumers. In ancillary markets, it circulated as capital that could be used by other industries, either as a supplement or as indispensable raw material for other “producers,” including vaudeville, dance halls, department stores, cafés, radio, and movies. A complete account of the rise of the music business and its consequences must integrate both dimensions of the new musical culture and recognize the dynamic interrelations between them.

The transformation of American musical culture constituted a departure from the disciplined, skill-based regime of the piano in the parlor in the nineteenth century. The advent of a novel kind of popular music written for the market brought light, catchy songs that were easy to play and sing into the rhythms of daily life, while for many people the growing use of player-pianos and phonographs displaced manual music playing altogether. Meanwhile, opera and other kinds of “serious” music were sold as a fresh form of cultural capital. Indeed, here was a new musical bonanza, bringing more choice and greater access for listeners than ever before, and these contributed to the growth of mass consumer society by promoting the separation between production and consumption and by marketing musical goods in innovative and influential ways. The rising tide of consumer capitalism had submerged within it three basic ideas, which were as well suited to the music business as to any other part of the emerging consumer economy: unending novelty, forever tantalizing consumers with the untasted pleasures of the always-new; the production not only of goods but also of desires; and the promise that consumption was the path to personal fulfillment. Consumers assimilated the idea of music as issuing from an automatic machine (such as a phonograph or player-piano), detached from human labor, and fixed in objects (such as records or piano rolls), portable and storable, and independent of time and place. Music, which had once been produced in the home, by hand, was now something to be purchased, like a newspaper or ready-to-wear dress. All the while, the major producers in the music industry advertised with unprecedented aggressiveness, and they developed inventive marketing strategies to attract retailers and consumers to the rewards of consumer credit.

In 1907 a typical trade magazine told merchants, “ Selling by installments is a means of appealing not only to the classes but to the masses. In other words, to those who would not, or could not, purchase goods on a cash basis.” Yet to consumers the industry conveyed quite a different message, as in this phonograph catalogue from the same year: “Buying on monthly payments does not imply, as some seem to think, that your means are limited.... It does show that you are adopting the latest practical and most efficient method of saving and purchasing.”

Music was not like other commodities in every way, however, for its essence was aural experience, a fact that was integral to the commercialization of musical life. In one form or another, sound was the commodity the music industry trafficked in, and as a consequence auditory exposure was inseparable from promotion. In the conclusion to his 1930 book on song publishing (still one of the shrewdest available), Isaac Goldberg stressed that exploitation of the aural environment was a fundamental strategy of the industry: “What you sing and whistle, then, is . . . the result of a huge plot—involving thousands of dollars and thousands of organized agents—to make you hear, remember and purchase.

The efforts of song promoters assail our ears wherever we go, because it is the business of this gentry to fill the air with music.” Notwithstanding his florid language, Goldberg's statement points up a fundamental law that guided the industry's development: the more music people heard—the more the air was “filled with music”—the better it was for business. As one music publisher who was active in the 1920s explained, “If people hear a melody, that would be advertisement. If they do not hear it, there is no way of selling it.”

As the new musical culture took shape, therefore, it altered the way music was made and heard, bought and sold, as well as effecting other changes that were broader and more subtle, especially the increasing presence and impact of music in the culture at large. An examination of the way music functioned and felt in people's lives can reveal patterns and tendencies that were characteristic of a specific time and place—what Raymond Williams called an era's “structure of feeling.” This concept posits a discernible connection between that which is external, physical, and impersonal (that is, structure) and that which is intimate, intangible, and ephemeral (that is, feeling). This is by no means a claim that a structure of feeling is homogenous or uniform, or that everyone experiences the structure of feeling in the same way. It is possible, however, to perceive similarities and trends specific to a given historical moment that together define the prevailing horizon of expectations for most people.

Once the music industries were filling the air with music, American society sounded different than it had a generation earlier. Much of the change was attributable to the thunderous cacophony of mass industrialization and urbanization, but music mattered too. Unlike the sounds of factories, automobiles, and teeming city streets, music was a kind of sound that people actively, consciously produced and deliberately tried to control; it was not a by-product of another function, the way the noise of automobiles was an incidental effect of their use for transportation.

All the clichés about the Roaring Twenties and the Jazz Age notwithstanding, the significance of this clamor has long been overlooked. In the minds of many philosophers, however, from Aristotle to Marx, it is, to a greater or lesser extent, through the senses that we humans know and understand the world. Such sensory experience is culturally—and therefore historically—conditioned; what is perceived as noise by the middle class at one moment may represent industriousness or freedom of expression to the working class. The senses inform our worldview, our historical consciousness, our sense of what is or is not possible at a given time. As part of a structure of feeling, the senses help constitute the affective mental apparatus through which rational thought is continuously filtered. As Marx noted, we perceive and understand the world through our bodies as well as our minds; the development of our senses is part of our cognitive formation. “Man is affirmed in the objective world not only in the act of thinking, but with all his senses,” Marx wrote, and elsewhere he concluded, “The forming of the five senses is a labor of the entire history of the world down to the present.” And Marx was not alone in drawing this conclusion. In The Power of Sound (1880), the polymath phi- losopher Edmund Gurney began, “It is now generally admitted that our organs of special sense, the channels by which we keep up our constant and various intercourse with what we call the external world, have been formed in past ages by gradual processes in correspondence with stimuli which that external world supplied.” A generation later, Walter Benjamin echoed this view: “Just as the entire mode of existence of human collectives changes over long historical periods, so too does their mode of perception.” Benjamin was particularly attentive in this respect to the importance of technology, which, he maintained, “has subjected the human sensorium to a complex kind of training.”

Earlier in the nineteenth century Nathaniel Hawthorne had grasped the impact of industrialization, when the noise of a locomotive annihilated a sentimental pastoral reverie near Concord, Massachusetts. As Hawthorne understood, sound is an intrusive phenomenon: we can avert our eyes from sights we wish to ignore, but sounds enter our ears whether we want them to or not. If sound contributes to the shaping of the self, then control of the acoustic environment—the “soundscape”—becomes an issue with real social and political consequences. In the eighteenth century, perpetrators of “rough music,” or charivari, used music and noise as a form of organized aggression or punishment. In nineteenth-century France the sound of village bells assumed explicit political significance in the mediation of competing claims to power among different villages in the countryside and between the church and the secular state.

Early in the twentieth century, as the music industry reordered the American soundscape, sound was invested with power in new ways. Much depended on which sounds the music industry promoted and which it ignored or suppressed. Its authority derived, in part, from the fact that control of the soundscape is generally an exclusive prerogative in any given space, at a given time: although we can easily process multiple visual stimuli, we experience hearing more than one piece of music at a time as cacophony, aural chaos. The influence of the music business over the sounds that filled the air was fundamental to the industry's impact.

Music can comfort and delight, but it can also annoy and distract. The long reach of the music business meant not only more music in more places than ever before, but also an erosion of silence or opportunities for reflection, for being alone, quietly, with one's own thoughts. And it meant the promotion of some music—that of the music industry—over other music. By marginalizing musical production that was not oriented toward the market, the industry rendered such music invisible (or rather, inaudible) or less legitimate.

Indeed, marketing based on sound gave the music industry unique scope and penetration—spatial, geographical, and social—far beyond that of virtually any other industry. Music products were “consumed” by people wherever and whenever the sounds were heard, a phenomenon that encompassed people of all classes, in every part of the country. As a consequence, the soundscape itself became a field of marketing, the aural equivalent of billboards, which first appeared alongside roadways in the same years, but far more pervasive.

Sound was also far more invasive, as demonstrated by the debates over radio advertising in the 1920s. These were intensified by the fact that as sound, music, which operated both above and below the level of consciousness, had an affective, behavioral influence on people. Like cradle songs sung to lull a baby to sleep, the modern commercial soundscape used music not merely to please but to produce specific effects, like the purchase of sheet music or improvement in sales and employee morale in department stores. As Oliver Wendell Holmes, Junior., noted of music in restaurants, if it had no effect, it would be abandoned.

More broadly, sound is a means by which the world enters the body. In contrast to the eye, which emphasizes the distinction between the self and the world, the ear brings the self and the world together. Through the eye, you see the world out there; you observe it as separate from yourself, perceive yourself in relation to it. Through the ear, you hear the world in your head; it enters inside you; you perceive the world from the inside out, as it were. More to the point, in the West the eye has been trained to see rationally—as Theodor Adorno and Hanns Eisler put it, “conceiving reality as made up of separate things, commodities, objects that can be modified by practical activity.” The ear, however, has not been conditioned by reason to the same degree. No matter how rationalized the production of the sound going into the ear, it remains an organ conditioned first and foremost by emotional response.

Though order, regularity, and calculability lay at the root of profitable, large-scale production of music, the long-term success of the industry depended on mass consumption. Animated by fantasy and enchantment, mass consumption of music grew out of people's emotional, not rational, reactions to the industry's fare. When these were combined with mass exposure and repetition, the result was to make a phenomenon seem commonplace that was actually radical and extraordinary. The rise of the music industry upended musical culture as it had been known, but within only a few decades changes as radical as the manufacturing of songs and the spatial and temporal separation between the production of music and its consumption had been broadly assimilated. As prevailing assumptions and expectations about music shifted, the normalization of aural commodities obscured the fact that every insertion of the products of the music business into the environment represented an active intervention in the culture—a decision to have this music over none, and to have this music over other possible music.

That being said, the burden of the analysis in Selling Sounds falls on the creation of the new musical culture and not on its reception. Consumers do not command our primary attention, because the creation of modern musical culture was not a consumer-driven phenomenon. The music industry did not grow in response to the unfulfilled desires of importunate consumers. Although consumers—music lovers—welcomed greater opportunities to hear and enjoy music, we would search in vain for evidence of their initiative. Nor was it musicians who propelled the transformation.

Musicians, as a rule, did not make records. Musicians made music—which phonograph companies turned into records that they reproduced, marketed, and sold. The radical reorganization of musical culture in the United States was driven instead by a new commercial class of music makers, including in one form or another entrepreneurs, inventors, manufacturers, publishers, sales agents, advertisers, critics, retailers, educators, and lawmakers. Some were also musicians, others not; some cared deeply about musical culture, others were indifferent.

Together, though, they harnessed musicians' creative talents and transformed music—that is, sound—into a versatile and valuable commodity. Not surprisingly, certain technological developments feature prominently in this story, but they alone did not determine its course and cannot by themselves account for such varied developments as the invention of the “hit song," the repackaging of grand-opera music for middlebrow markets, or the mobilization of education, advertising, and law in the service of the music industry.

Emile Berliner died in the summer of 1929, two months before the stock market crash and five weeks after the death of Julius Witmark, the erstwhile “Boy Soprano.” The passing of these men coincided with the end of the formative period of the modern music business. By this time, numerous developments, including the advent of radio and the “talkies,” had signaled the start of a new phase of commercial entertainment. The consolidation of many of the leading firms in the entertainment business reconfigured the field of the music industry and initiated the era of integrated multimedia conglomerates, whose descendants have grown to mammoth proportions.

By 2005, according to one estimate, the “core” copyright industries accounted for 6.6 percent of the gross domestic product, and thanks to the growth in computer software, those industries had become the leading sector of foreign sales and exports for the United States—ahead of chemical products, motor vehicles, aerospace, agriculture, and pharmaceuticals. Indeed, recorded sound alone, not including its value within movies, television shows, or other products, accounted for 8.26 billion of the copyright industries' foreign revenue. “I Hear America Singing” had become “We Are the World.”

No element was more important to the growing international prominence of the American music business than recorded sound, the commercial production of which had its origins in the United States but developed transnationally in the early twentieth century. In 1929, on the eve of the Great Depression, the phonograph industry in the United States pressed more than 105 million records and manufactured more than 750,000 phonographs, together valued at nearly $100 million. In the same year, almost 50 million records were sold in the United Kingdom and almost 30 million in Germany, and even such disparate locales as Peru, Finland, Egypt, and Malaya had sales of a million records a year or more. Music, especially in the United States, was now inseparable from the technology and business of mechanical reproduction. Meanwhile, the popularity of recordings sent the American piano business into terminal decline. By the late 1920s, the popularity of player-pianos had faded, and at the end of the decade only eighty-one piano manufacturers remained in the United States, down from a peak of nearly three hundred in 1909. By 1933 that number dropped to thirty-six. The decline of the piano business notwithstanding, however, the music business and the culture industry have continued to grow, and the more they have, the more normalized and invisible their power has become. That is, the more the music industry has filled the air with music, the less remarkable the ubiquity of music seems. The foundation of this peculiarly modern condition was set in the early twentieth century, when the music industry drove a wedge between production and consumption—between making music and listening to it—and invested music with new meaning in such a way that obscured the commercial architecture of the new cultural order.

Music entered people's homes and lives in exciting new ways, but this expansion depended on a complex set of social and cultural changes, whose meanings reached far beyond music proper. In order to evaluate the effect of this commercial revolution in music, we must first understand how it took place.