Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American MusicFrom Tin Pan Alley to grand opera, player-pianos to phonograph records, David Suisman’s Selling Sounds explores the rise of music as big business and the creation of a radically new musical culture. Around the turn of the twentieth century, music entrepreneurs laid the foundation for today’s vast industry, with new products, technologies, and commercial strategies to incorporate music into the daily rhythm of modern life. Popular songs filled the air with a new kind of musical pleasure, phonographs brought opera into the parlor, and celebrity performers like Enrico Caruso captivated the imagination of consumers from coast to coast. |
Contents
1 | |
18 | |
2 Making Hits | 56 |
3 Music without Musicians | 90 |
4 The Traffic in Voices | 125 |
5 Musical Properties | 150 |
6 Perfect Pitch | 178 |
7 The Black Swan | 204 |
8 The Musical Soundscape of Modernity | 240 |
Epilogue | 273 |
Abbreviations in Notes | 287 |
Notes | 289 |
Acknowledgments | 339 |
Index | 343 |