David Suisman adds a new dimension to the discussion of the contemporary omnipresence of music when he asks who actually controls our acoustic environment. He points out how the music industry's presence permeates our lives, and explores how soundscapes became a field of marketing. He investigates how, when and why music became a commodity, and therefore explains how the modern music industry took shape in the US.
Suisman argues that popular song was redefined as a new kind of aural commodity in the 1890s, when publishers within the sheet music business began to actively cultivate their markets and build up a national infrastructure to promote and distribute this commodity. He thus regards popular song as a distinct historical creation and not just as the opposite of so-called ‘serious’ music. He describes Tin Pan Alley – with its division of labour into standardised processes and specialised jobs – as a model for the culture industries of the 20th century. He pays special attention here to the strategies of promotion or ‘plugging’, which would fill formerly uncommercialised aural space in movie houses, restaurants, cafés and dance halls, in shopping malls and department stores.
The book then moves on to the phonograph business which, as Suisman points out, entered the music industry from the outside, quite unlike the player-piano business, which was integrated into the piano industry. What both had in common, though, Suisman highlights, is that they promoted classical works instead of popular songs and thus relied on different marketing strategies. In a case study on Victor's Red Seal series, Suisman outlines how the cultural legitimacy of the phonograph was cultivated by promoting these records as a piece of timeless, serious art. Through Victor's success, Edison's belief that ‘the marvel of the technology would sell itself’ (p. 146) was proven wrong, since ‘technical superiority did not necessarily excite consumers the way celebrity artists did’ (ibid.). Victor certainly employed celebrity artists for its catalogues, beginning with Caruso. Suisman argues that he was a new model of celebrity persona, since his fame was created through promotion for a commercial product and advanced through a retail economy. Suisman also illustrates how Berliner's gramophone design, which did not allow for home recordings, initiated the structural and social division between production and consumption distinctive of the modern music industry.
An especially interesting part of the book is Suisman's description of Victor's promotional strategies on a local level: the training and monitoring of retailers, the role of trade magazines such as the Voice of the Victor therein, early forms of data mining and strategies to enter the educational market. Via Black Swan Records Suisman presents an interesting case study of the racial politics of production and consumption in the 1920s. This black-owned label sought both to raise up America's black population and to record serious music. As a race-based business, however, it finally found itself in the peculiar situation of selling white artists under black pseudonyms within what was a supposedly an all-black catalogue. This certainly offers a different perspective on ‘race’ catalogues. The book also covers the development of copyright law in the US and the revisions of it which took place in order to try and cope with deal with modern reproductive processes. Suisman also stresses how the privileging musical authorship while excluding other professions enforced a particular definition of ‘music’ or music making.
Although the book ends with the present setting of New York's Union Square, Suisman's investigations actually end in the 1930s. Within a few pages of the epilogue we pass the events of later decades, but Suisman claims that the last major changes came about in the mid-1920s with the advent of radio and sound film and the beginning process of centralisation within the culture industry, when Hollywood studios took over Tin Pan Alley's publishing firms and the merger between RCA and Victor in 1929 launched a new era of multimedia conglomerates. He argues that this cultural order has not changed much through the internet, and that the major companies are not defunct, not least due to the existing structure of copyright law.
Suisman tells this history of the American music industry through different case studies but also through personal histories. We meet people like Charles K. Harris and John Philip Sousa and observe a plugger's typical day. Suisman employs newspaper articles, contemporary quotes and anecdotes, all of which serve to make the book very readable. He also provides a significant number of illustrations. It is remarkable, however, that his discussion of sheet music does not contain any pictures of the latter – only covers or chorus slips are displayed. He even provides the picture of a player piano roll later on, but no example of the infectious melodies he mentions. Likewise, the idea of the actual sound quality of those early recordings remains a bit vague.
Nonetheless, this book shows that many patterns to be observed within the music industry today have a long history. These include the fact that sheet music publishers did not expect to break even on every song, that ‘Red Seals’ boosted sales for all of Victor's records; that song slides have been used by pluggers in movie houses almost 90 years before MTV; that Caruso was Victor's first signature artist; and that informal, offstage celebrity photographs have been used at the beginning of the 20th century to humanise the industrial process. Suisman could have enforced these aspects through a more diachronic approach, but unfortunately he does not position his study in relation to current research on this topic. This reader would also wish for a bibliography. On the other hand, I have seldom read a book where the title fits its contents so well.
With the exception of the chapter on Black Swan Records, the book does not necessarily provide a lot of new information to popular music scholars. It is rather the synthesis of material and its particular point of view which makes it a valuable contribution to the field. Overall this is highly recommended reading, primarily because it adds a much-needed historical perspective to popular music studies.
