ABSTRACT
Already in 1890, frustrated phonograph merchants were turning away from business uses and toward the growing coin-in-the-slot business. By the mid-1890s, this was one of the main areas in which money could be made. David Nasaw locates the boom in the coin-in-the-slot business as part of a larger, emergent, middle-class culture of public and semipublic entertainments. Coinin-the-slot machines, where a user could hear a song for a fee, were located in hotel lobbies, train stations, and arcades. As cities grew more spread out, a well-placed arcade could entertain commuters with a few minutes to kill and a few cents in their pockets. The boom period for this business lasted only a few years. Between the erosion of phonography’s novelty to coin-in-the-slot users and a bottleneck in the manufacture and distribution of new recordings, the potential of arcade-style listening to support the industry died off in the first decade of the twentieth century.1
