[78-L] Book Announcement: Record Cultures

[Kyle Barnett]

This may be of interest to the listserv. Apologies for cross-posting. Discount code: UMRECORD (30% off)

Best,
Kyle Barnett
https://www.press.umich.edu/9901441/record_cultures
An e-book version is free until the end of June: https://www.fulcrum.org/concern/monographs/rn301295h?locale=en

"Record Cultures tells the story of how early U.S. commercial recording companies captured American musical culture in a key period in both music and media history. Amid dramatic technological and cultural changes of the 1920s and 1930s, small recording companies in the United States began to explore the genres that would later be known as jazz, blues, and country. Smaller record labels, many based in rural or out of the way Midwestern and Southern towns, were willing to take risks on the country’s regional vernacular music as a way to compete with more established recording labels. Recording companies’ relationship with radio grew closer as both industries were on the rise, propelled by new technologies. Radio, which had become immensely popular, began broadcasting more recorded music in place of live performances, and this created profitable symbiosis. With the advent of the talkies, the film industry completed the media trifecta. The novelty of recorded sound was replacing film accompanists, and the popularity of movie musicals solidified film’s connections with the radio and recording industries. By the early 1930s, the recording industry had gone from being part of the largely autonomous phonograph industry to being major media industry of its own, albeit deeply tied to—and, in some cases, owned by—the radio and film industries. The triangular relationships between these media industries marked the first major entertainment and media conglomerates in U.S. history.
Through an interdisciplinary and intermedial approach to recording industry history, Record Cultures creates new connections between different strands of media research. It will be of interest to scholars of popular music, media studies, sound studies, American culture, and the history of film, television, and radio."

“At last, a scholarly study that integrates the history of phonography with radio and film, to show how the interlocking operations of these key media sectors worked to produce twentieth-century media culture.  Solidly researched and full of colorful details.”
—Michele Hilmes, University of Wisconsin-Madison
"Record Cultures changes the way we think about US popular music. Pulling back the corporate curtain, Barnett reveals that the infamously opaque ‘culture industry’ was constructed by a collection of music-biz personalities making decisions based on their knowledge of the field or their ignorance about music, a desire to foster new consumers or self-interest as they saw it, and expertise or dumb luck. The result, nevertheless, was the recording, preservation, and transformation of our nation’s music.” — Karl Hagstrom Miller, University of Virginia