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Dividing time up by decades is an arbitrary convenience that often does not reflect reality. Nothing magical happens at the stroke of midnight on a New Year’s Day marking the change of a decade, but setting off history in ten-year segments allows us to examine change from one point to another. In a sense, there was not much difference in the record business from the 1900s to the 1910s; several important characteristics carried over into the new decade. Although record sales had increased enormously during the 1900s, the record industry was still only a small part of the popular music business, which continued to be dominated by the music publishers of Tin Pan Alley. Estimates of the size of that business vary greatly. The reliable historian Russell Sanjek puts aggregate sales of sheet music in 1910 at 30 million copies with higher figures to come, but other sources claim 2 billion copies of sheet music were sold in what they say was the business’s peak year. In any case, music publishing, not records, drove the business, and, as was true of the 1900s, today we recall the most popular songs of the 1910s (“Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” “Over There,” “Let Me Call You Sweetheart,” “Moonlight Bay,” “Rock-A-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody,” to name only a few) and some of the major songwriters of the day (Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Victor Herbert, George M. Cohan) but not most of the major recording artists. According to Joel Whitburn, five of the decade’s ten top recording artists had also ranked in the top ten of the 1900s-Henry Burr, Arthur Collins, Byron Harlan, Billy Murray, and Ada Jones-all names virtually lost to history.