ABSTRACT
Despite media history’s increasing attention to the cultural aspects of the film, television, and radio industries, such research on the recording industry remains largely absent. In popular music scholar and archivist Pekka Gronow’s essay, “The Record Industry: The Growth of a Mass Medium,” he writes that while it seems logical to include sound recordings in the study of media, “a glimpse at standard textbooks on mass communication makes us doubt our common sense” (Gronow 1983, 53). Although present-day media studies textbooks often include historical overviews on sound recordings and the recording industry, both topics commonly disappear after introductory classes. While the notion that sound recordings constitute media may seem so obvious as not to be arguable, they have rarely been included in media history, and when we contextualize sound recordings within the industry that produces them, there is less historical research. This is surprising, given the ubiquity of recorded music in media and the long involvement of other industries in ownership and cross-promotion. In reading existing literature, it sometimes seems that the recording industry emerged in the mid-1950s.1 The pre-rock’n’roll period saw the industry’s institutional culture take shape through a complicated cultural circuit that included musicians, recording engineers, talent scouts, record salespeople, journalists, advertisers, and consumers. An historical approach with the specificity to glean a discursive history of the recording industry’s organizing principles as they emerged could inform various lines of thought in contemporary research. Going beyond mere historical overviews and technological progress narratives, what is missing is an explanation of how an ever-changing but distinct cultural formation helped to understand, organize, and define popular music. Perhaps as scholars increasingly recognize the historically close relationship between industries, comparative media histories including the recording
industry might be written, but given the complexities of the recording industry, a fuller accounting of its discrete history is just as important. For many years, the two commonly cited industry histories came from outside academe. Roland Gelatt’s The Fabulous Phonograph was published in 1977 and Oliver Read and Walter Welch’s From Tin Foil to Stereo had been published first in 1959. These histories focus on technological issues and institutional machinations but do not give a sense of the recording industry as a multifaceted cultural formation. While useful, they also run the risk of reducing recording industry history to a series of technological shifts. Research from across academic disciplines (mostly by History and American Studies scholars) has been published within the past decade, including William Howland Kenney’s Recorded Music In American Life (1999), David Morton’s Off The Record (2000), and Andre Millard’s America on Record (2005). These histories help fill a tremendous gap in research, though the focus remains on recorded sound technology. In terms of industry history, Sanjek and Sanjek’s Pennies From Heaven (1996) and Tim Anderson’s Making Easy Listening (2006) clearly focus on the record business. Sanjek and Sanjek’s text remains a key resource in recording industry history, popular music history, and its links to other entertainment and media industries.2 Anderson’s more succinct and discrete social and cultural history brings together commercial practices, consumer listening aesthetics, and technological aspects of the industry as a dynamic cultural institution.3 The most useful and succinct industry overview is Geoffrey Hull’s The Recording Industry (1997), though it spends little time on history. With little recording industry research in media history, perhaps the clearest hope for cultural histories of the recording industry comes from popular music studies.4 The study of popular music has been interdisciplinary from the start but, through its connection to cultural studies, initially focused on contemporary subcultures research. Simon Frith’s “The Industrialization of Popular Music” provided a much-needed historical overview that collapsed the distinction between “music-as-expression” and “music-as-commodity” through suggesting the centrality of the industry in the music-making process (Frith 1987, 53-54). Dave Laing pointed to a lack of historical research in the recording industry by going back to the 1890s (Laing 1991, 1).5
