ABSTRACT
In the years following World War II, record sales surged. Columbia Records alone reported a sales increase of 850 per cent from 1945 to 1946, and all of the other large companies registered profit increases of at least 100 per cent in the same year.1 Record buyers gained new influence as record men tallied and noted their purchases. Established labels and start-ups alike courted the consumer as never before, even as public tastes in pop music veered to the idiosyncratic. In the resulting commercial hubbub, ideas about acceptable musical sound and attitudes to records themselves evolved in surprising ways. In previous decades, real-time musical performance provided the standard frame of reference as technology and music began an uncertain partnership. Network radio broadcasts were mostly live and recordists did their best to accurately render live performances. But in the post-war clamour, this arrangement changed. Pop records went from documentary snapshots representing past events of remote provenance to aesthetic artefacts in their own right, their place and time forever here and now. They were absolved of representational responsibility; the natural sound world ceased to be their primary referent.
