American Music Industry Research Articles

The (R)evolution of Music Video in American Music Industry

The essay offers a concise historical examination of the evolution of music videos and places this medium within the broader context of the popular music industry, which is influenced by the principles of late capitalism. The study highlights the significance of music videos in the popular music industry and media studies, underscoring their role as both promotional and artistic products. It traces the medium's development, from its early days as "illustrated songs" in the late 19th century to the MTV era's explosion, marked by groundbreaking music video directors and the digital turn in the 21st century, which has reshaped the landscape of music video production, distribution, and reception. The article also addresses emerging trends, such as visual albums and changes in video length and format, reflecting shifts in music consumption and technology. In conclusion, it asserts that music videos continue to evolve, challenging conventions and fostering a multisensory, intermedial relationship with audiences.

Race and Economic Justice in Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue

Michael Chabon’s novel Telegraph Avenue (2012) offers a feel-good narrative of interracial male sociability by way of its fictional Brokeland Records store. Yet at the same time, the novel purposefully evokes the dire economic consequences of America’s racialized history in cultural fields as diverse as midcentury urban redevelopment and the American music industry. Ultimately, however, the novel dodges the gnawing fact that its privileged interracial bonhomie avoids the harder truths of American racial and economic history. In gesturing toward but finally not grappling overtly with the devastating economic effects of American racial policy, Telegraph Avenue is symptomatic of a certain strain of American ideology that regularly reduces racism to a problem to be solved simply via diversity rather than through economic justice.

Contributors’ Notes

Contributors’ Notes

Historical Dictionary of the American Music Industry by Keith Hatschek and Veronica A. Wells

Reviewed by: Historical Dictionary of the American Music Industry by Keith Hatschek and Veronica A. Wells Robert Willey Historical Dictionary of the American Music Industry. By Keith Hatschek and Veronica A. Wells. (Historical Dictionaries of Professions and Industries.) Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018. [xxiii, 360 p. ISBN 9781538111437 (hardcover), $95; ISBN 9781538111444 (e-book), price varies.] Acronyms and abbreviations, chronology, appendixes, bibliography. [End Page 434] This reference book gives a broad overview of how the popular-music industry has evolved in the United States in the last 250 years and includes entries covering the practices, terminology, concepts, careers, and representative pioneers who have created music and brought it to the public. One in a series of historical dictionaries published by Rowman & Littlefield, this volume follows the same format as the Historical Dictionary of Librarianship, presenting subject terms in bold while indicating where to find synonyms or related terms, which makes it easy to scan the pages and locate what is of interest. This cross referencing is of special value. For example, the reader is directed to see “DJ” for information about “Deejays”, and to also read about the “First Sale Doctrine” in the entry on “Copyright.” The conciseness of the entries makes it a valuable supplement to textbooks on the subject, where indexes help locate pages that include terms, but which can then be slow to find the references providing the information that is desired. Readers have become used to searching for information on the internet, but this book saves time by collecting consistently high-quality results that won’t become outdated. While the book is intended to be a dictionary on individual subjects, the fact that the authors have also incorporated many interesting facts that are not covered elsewhere makes it enjoyable to read it in spurts from start to end. Like others in the series, this Dictionary begins with four pages of abbreviations and acronyms, which would be helpful for deciphering the language in contracts, for example. This is followed by a nine-page chronology of developments over a wide range of topics, including technology (radio, records, television, portable systems, networks), advertisers, festivals, and investors. I was happy to find many facts that a reader is unlikely to be aware of even if they are familiar with the field—for example, that the first commercial radio was installed in an automobile in 1930 and that the cast of Hair (which opened on Broadway in 1968) performed at the March on Washington. This timeline often reveals the synchronicity between multiple events in the same year. The next section is a thirty-two-page condensed history that provides an excellent overview of the music industry. A slower reading pace is required, since it packed with information, and many facts are delivered in succession without a lot of transitional passages. The authors begin with the colonial era and proceed through minstrelsy (where the pattern of cultural appropriation in American popular music of African American culture began), vaudeville, and how advances in printing, the expansion of the postal service, and affordable sheet music led to the rise of Tin Pan Alley publishers. Printed scores became less important as radio became popular, and the teen market created by baby boomers and advertising fueled the birth of rock and roll. Music popular with teenagers in the 1960s became mainstream; later festivals and corporations made it more of a commodity, and video made it a more visual medium. The drop in record sales in the last twenty years made live-performance revenue more important. The book was released just before the COVID-19 pandemic, making it a useful snapshot of the industry just before it began to increasingly shift to online experiences. The bulk of the work rests in the more than five hundred entries. The authors achieved a good balance between presenting information on individuals responsible for music and those instrumental for how it is sold. Readers on the outside of the industry will be more familiar with the names of artists and bands than those of record-label executives, managers, talent agents, [End Page 435] producers, inventors, promoters, and DJs who work behind the scenes. The focus is on the popular-music industry...

About the Contributors

About the Contributors

THE FORM OF SENSUALITY IN HISPANIC MUSIC IN AMERICAN MUSIC INDUSTRY: DISCOURSE ANALYSIS ON AMERICAN POPULAR MUSIC

In 2017 and 2018, Hispanic music reaches high popularity as world music. The reaction came from the American music industry, seen through the production of Hispanic music in American music industry, which brings Hispanic music as a part of American popular music. In this case, American popular musicians started to produce music that contains Hispanic music characteristics. Among all of the characteristics, the form of sensuality becomes a significant aspect in producing Hispanic music, even in American music industry. In relation to this fact, this research is conducted in order to see how the form of sensuality supports the popularity of Hispanic music. The theory of Discourse Analysis by Michel Foucault is applied to analyze sensuality as adiscourse behind the popularity of Hispanic music. As a research conducted within the frame of American Studies, this research also usesthe postmodern approach to see the new formula related to the form of sensuality in Hispanic music, especially when produced in the American music industry.

Keith Hatschek and Veronica A. Wells. Historical Dictionary of the American Music Industry

Keith Hatschek and Veronica A. Wells. Historical Dictionary of the American Music Industry

There Was a Fire: Jews, Music, and the American Dream by Ben Sidran (review)

Reviewed by: There Was a Fire: Jews, Music, and the American Dream by Ben Sidran Judah M. Cohen There Was a Fire: Jews, Music, and the American Dream Ben Sidran. New York: Nardis Books, 2012. 372pp. Ben Sidran’s self-published book There Was a Fire (his publisher, Nardis, is Sidran backwards) presents the dilemma of subjecting an artist-cum-scholar to academic review. Sidran has extensive experience in the American popular music business, having produced and recorded numerous albums, worked in several musical genres, obtained a PhD in 1970, and released the “Jewish jazz” album Life’s a Lesson in 1993. Such background could have produced an interesting contribution to the emerging literature on Jews in the recording industry. Sidran’s choice to overextend his ambitions into a broad history of Jews in American music, however, offers little of scholarly value. Short on primary research and long on secondhand anecdotes, this [End Page 131] sermonic book and accompanying lecture CD (recorded at Los Angeles’s Skirball Cultural Center in January 2006) rehashes rather than enlightens. In telling his story, Sidran largely repackages the secondary literature he knows—biographies, journalistic accounts, and some historical scholarship—to emphasize Jews’ presence in and contributions to the American music industry. The resulting look-at-all-the-Jews safari presents American popular music as if it emerged from a largely homogenous Jewish communal experience in America. Jews, to Sidran, dominated everything from Tin Pan Alley to the Brill Building to Payola through the common trope of seeking acceptance—a perspective he emphasizes further on the CD. He consequently covers most of the major figures expected of Jews in popular music surveys, including Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Harold Arlen, Bob Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel, Steely Dan, and the Beastie Boys, with a number of lesser known songwriters and music executives added to the mix. Sidran follows a common technique in popular music writing by providing a torrent of details on his topic, reflecting an intimacy with the subject and insider knowledge of the music scene. But in this case those details ultimately serve a moral argument: Sidran calls on today’s Jews to reconnect with their communal roots in what he sees as a time of existential crisis. And perhaps predictably for someone of his generation, rap, hip-hop, and new technology take the fall for weakening a previously strong social and moral fabric. (As with most other topics in this book, his claim ignores decades of nuanced scholarly discussion, from Tricia Rose’s fundamental 1994 study Black Noise onward.) This technique can give the reader a feeling of immediacy; yet rather than scrutinizing his material, Sidran largely takes it at face value, carefully assembling facts from other books into a self-affirming claim for the place of Jewish identity in modern America, complete with proper apologetics (Jews may have exploited African Americans in the 1940s, for example, but everyone was exploiting everyone at the time [142–43]). Determined to show Jews’ “influence” in the pop music industry, he peppers the text with unsupported generalizations, such as “all the stories in the Bible were once magical songs” (6), “to have the story support the music [in musical theater] was a very Jewish concept” (51), “the Jews didn’t put the danger into the music [of the 1950s]; they gave that danger a context and a story” (166), “[the] resolution of apparent opposites . . . is directly connected to the classic Jewish experience” (198), and several unexplained references to artists’ “Talmudic” actions. These details lead to flights of fantasy, reproduced truism, and occasionally outright error. At the start of both his book and lecture, for example, [End Page 132] Sidran claims that Jews, at about 2% of the American population, are responsible for about 80% of America’s popular music—and then readily admits that he made up the figure (11). He calls cantillation symbols “talmim” rather than “te’amim” (9) and oddly attributes the Ramones’ use of Nazi imagery to Stockholm Syndrome (230). Several names of figures he doesn’t know personally are misspelled (Fiddler on the Roof creators Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick become “Bach” and “Harneck” [218], for example). His citations can be careless and incomplete...

The Indian Copyright (Amendment) Act of 2012 and American Digital Music Exports: Why the United States Should Make Stricter Anti-Circumvention Laws in India an American Diplomatic Priority

India presents the American music industry with a new frontier. Thanks to the wide distribution of cell phones, an expanding digital infrastructure, and a growing appetite for music entertainment, India has become an important digital music export market for the United States. However, widespread digital piracy has hampered India's potential as a digital music market. In the United States, anti-circumvention laws have established a legal infrastructure that defends a digital access right independent of copyright. As a result, the United States has witnessed the emergence of services that offer low priced digital music that has managed to curb piracy. This article argues that the Indian Copyright (Amendment) Act of 2012 fails to provide for the independent access right that serves as the legal backbone of America's digital music marketplace. In order to unlock the gateway to India's expanding digital music consumer base, this article advocates that the United States make the adoption of stricter anti-circumvention laws in India an American diplomatic priority.

A Creative Industry in Transition: The Rise of Digitally Driven Independent Music Production

AbstractThis paper nuances our understanding of the ongoing transition within the North American music industry. It extends the existing analysis of the so‐called “MP3 Crisis” by exploring the ways in which digital technologies have challenged the entrenched power of the major record labels. In particular, new insights are offered based on interviews with music industry executives who have been active in shaping the industry's response to illegal file sharing. The paper also uses interview data from musicians to investigate the implications of restructuring at the macroscale on creative talent at the microscale. As such, it documents the structures and spatial dynamics of digitally driven independent music production in Canada for the first time.

Out of Bounds: Islands and the Demarcation of Identity in the Hispanic Caribbean (review)

Reviewed by: Out of Bounds: Islands and the Demarcation of Identity in the Hispanic Caribbean Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé Keywords Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé, Out of Bounds: Islands and the Demarcation of Identity in the Hispanic Caribbean, Dara Goldman, Hispanic Caribbean, National Identity, Island Nationalism, Caribbean Literature Goldman, Dara. Out of Bounds: Islands and the Demarcation of Identity in the Hispanic Caribbean. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 2008. 249 pp. Hispanic Caribbean writers have often resorted to the trope of the nation as an island in order to proclaim a sense of national belonging and identity that would seem to emerge naturally from the geographical accident of living on an island. Dara Goldman’s recent, wide-ranging, well-researched, and well-crafted book, Out of Bounds, teases out some of the tensions, complexities, and paradoxes that this apparently natural national trope would seek to elide. And she helps us to understand, in the process, why, despite the increased diasporization of the population of the islands of the Hispanic Caribbean (more than half of all Puerto Ricans reside now in the continental United States), and the increasing decline of master narratives of national identity in the Caribbean and around the world, this insular trope of national identity is nowhere near reaching exhaustion. Quite the contrary, as her book shows, ranging widely from nineteenth-century foundational fiction to Internet Web sites, the insular trope remains not only a pervasive presence in Hispanic Caribbean cultural production in the islands but also, and especially, in the diaspora as well. A close examination of the insular metaphor from its beginnings in the nineteenth-century Caribbean foundational fiction of the Puerto Ricans Eugenio María de Hostos and Salvador Brau, the Cuban Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda and the Dominican Manuel de Jesús Galván to its contemporary incarnations in US Latino fiction, American music industry’s Latin Explosion, and Puerto Rican Internet sites, reveals a genealogy in which the island trope is increasingly displaced or moved out of its center, “out of bounds,” to that which seemed previously, from the perspective of its nineteenth-century foundational tales, to exceed it, or even negate it. Throughout the course of the twentieth century, Goldman argues, the island trope has been extended and displaced onto the previously abjected spaces of the sex(ile), the migrant, and diasporic subject, and most recently the Internet. The insular metaphor has not only not been left behind, superseded, or transcended in Hispanic Caribbean literature and culture, whether in the islands or abroad; it has been globalized, as the cover picture for Out of Bounds by the contemporary [End Page 274] Cuban artist Antonio Eligio Fernández, or Tonel, shows: an installation representing a map in which the entire world is made up of smaller discrete units that are wooden carvings of the island of Cuba and in which all the other islands of the Caribbean have been subsumed into Cuba or absorbed by Tonel’s consuming island trope. Titled El mundo soñado, this installation could just as easily read as a nightmare. Those who worry about the darker possibilities of the island metaphor, such as the Cuban poet Reina María Rodríguez, have much to ponder here. But why hasn’t this metaphor been superseded or transcended as a kind of antiquated and ineffectual ideological remnant of an earlier era? Much of Goldman’s argument here would seem to evolve from a careful reading of some of the most thorough meditations on the insular trope produced in the Hispanic Caribbean: José Lezama Lima’s “Coloquio con Juan Ramón Jiménez,” Virgilio Piñera’s “La isla en peso,” Antonio S. Pedreira’s Insularismo, and Antonio Benítez Rojo’s La isla que se repite. (One misses here the crucially important work of the Puerto Rican poets Luis Palés Matos and Julia de Burgos on this trope.) In examining their texts, Goldman discovers that, despite the divergent meanings they each attach to the insular trope, they all seem to share a contradictory, or better yet, a paradoxical, rhetorical feature. For all these writers, Hispanic Caribbean insularismo or insularity is both an obstacle and an opportunity, both a problem and a solution...

Analysing the breakthrough of rock ‘n’ roll (1930–1970) Multi-regime interaction and reconfiguration in the multi-level perspective

The breakthrough of rock ‘n’ roll was part of broader transformations in the American music industry, involving changes in music instruments, music recording technology, audiences, radio programming and music styles. These transformations will be analysed as sociotechnical transition, using the multi-level perspective. One characteristic of the case is interactions between multiple regimes: radio and recording. Another characteristic is the presence of strong cultural components, with rock ‘n’ roll as proxy. These characteristics lead to theoretical adjustments in the multi-level perspective. Further analysis also suggests a particular transition path of reconfiguration, in which multiple niche-innovations cumulatively transform the regime.

Stealing the Blues: Does Intellectual Property Appropriation Belong in the Debate Over African-American Reparations?

Black artists and performers created virtually every original American musical genre, but found their work appropriated wholesale in the early American music industry. The combination of copyright and contract law grafted upon a pervasive system of racial stratification facilitated the widespread exploitation of Black artists. As the debate over reparations for African-Americans proceeds, the systematic deprivation of creative artists deserves consideration within the debate. Claims for theft of creative product overcome some, although certainly not all of the traditional obstacles to reparations. For these reasons, IP deprivations arguably belong in the debate over African-American reparations.

Beat Streets in the Global Hood: Connective Marginalities of the Hip Hop Globe

Public Enemy showed us that Rap music is not afraid of subjects connected with national and race issues. We started to see how powerful Rap could be if it were used in expressing our attitudes. The kind of lyrics and consciousness that reveals whole process of civilization, which is story of dominance. -Benjamin, Croatian fan of rap group Public Enemy1 At beginning of twenty-first century and third millennium term village has become a cliche. The telecommunications revolution has situated us in an Information Age that is proliferated with various high-technology media: cellular telephones, web television, over fifty national cable television channels including interactive ZDTV, computer-mediated communication through Internet with chat rooms of fictitiously-constructed identities, speech technologies that allow for computing between different languages, and instantaneous satellite-- projected news stories throughout planet, just to name a few. The concept of global virtual reality is no longer a vision of a few computer hackers, but is fast-becoming a household phenomenon. A concomitant global pop culture, based in music and dance videos, simulcasts of rock concerts throughout major metropoles, and an intensely-marketed modern lifestyle through all manner of brand names and symbols of consumer goods, clothes, athletic shoes, and head gear are materiality of a global youth-oriented culture. Young people throughout planet, in their formative stages of puberty and beyond, are particularly affected by this fast-paced-MTV-soundbyte-information-glutted age that is at center of increasingly homogenized post-modernization process. African American music, dance, and style, at epicenter of American culture, are not only part of this technology-mediated global youth culture, but are absolutely essential to it. Black music and dances that depict changing afro-sonic styles are bought and sold in exigencies of a global supply-and-demand capitalist marketplace on a daily basis. Music legend Quincy Jones remembers that When tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins recorded Body and Soul it took from 1939 to 1953 to get word around world that song was out. Today, you have instantaneous releases by satellite. (10E) In today's world neosoul artist D'Angelo can be marketed to new touring sites in South East Asia, just as rapper Hammer was in Russia in early nineties, and just as Barry Gordy's Motown recording artists were to Western European market thirty years before either of them. The steadily increasing extension of black music's influence is part of United States becoming world power. However, black music's global influence is also due to it being the most unique cultural product... as Cornel West recognizes, created by Americans of any hue (Kruger and Mariani 94). Along with global marketing strategies of American music industry, for better or worse, American values and lifestyles in all of their diversity have followed. Black popular culture today is even more snared in larger economic vicissitudes-it is what sells to more people than ever before-while simultaneously being at nucleus of a postmodern web of control over global social narratives of identity. The most invading of black music in last twenty years has been rap. Global hip hop youth culture has become a phenomenon in truest sense of word and has affected nearly every country on map. William Eric Perkins, editor of seminal scholarly anthology Droppin' Science: Critical Essays on Rap and Hip Hop Culture (1996), explains that hip hop revolution is just that, an uprooting of old way in style and culture, and introduction of a taste of black and Latino urban authenticity to every corner of globe. (257) Nelson George, in his new Hip Hop America, extols persuasiveness of hip hop culture: From Vancouver and Toronto in Canada, to Dakar in Senegal, to Holland, to Cuba's Havana, to every place satellites beam music videos and CDs are sold (or bootlegged or counterfeited), hip hop has made an impression. …

What the Publisher Can Teach the Patient: Intellectual Property and Privacy in an Era of Trusted Privication

This article begins with a premise that intellectual property and privacy have something significant and yet understated in common: both are about balancing a creator's desire to control a particular set of data with consumers' desires to access and redistribute that data. Both law and technology influence such balancing, making it more or less palatable to use data for particular purposes--whether one is an individual making a copy of a popular song for a friend, or a hospital selling a list of maternity ward patients to a day care service. In the shadow of the Internet's rapid development and concomitant easing of barriers to data sharing, holders of intellectual property are pairing increased legal protection with the technologies of "trusted systems." I describe how these technologies might allow more thorough mass distribution of data, while allowing publishers to retain unprecedented control over their wares. For instance, an e-Book seller might charge one price for a read-only copy that could not be printed or forwarded and charge an additional fee for each copy or printout made. Taking up the case of medical privacy, I then suggest that those who worry about the confidentiality of medical records, particularly as they are digitized by recent congressional mandate, might seek to augment comparatively paltry legal protections with trusted systems technologies. For instance, a trusted system could allow a patient to specify how and by whom her records could be used; within limits, she could allow full access to her primary care physician, while allowing only time-limited access to emergency care providers, non-personally identifiable access to medical researchers, and no access at all for marketing purposes. These technologies could allow for new kinds of privacy protection, without sacrificing the legitimate interests of the consumers of medical records.

Essays on Cuban music: North American and Cuban perspectives

The first book-length study on Cuban music in the English language. This volume consists of thirteen articles written by nine authors, including four Cuban scholars and five North American ethnomusicologists. The articles by Cuban scholars, translated from largely out-of-print publications, constitute a selection of some of the best Cuban research on their island's music, and present a set of perspectives which complement those of the North American authors. The articles cover such areas as descriptions of the Afro-Haitian derived tumba francesa, the traditional Afro-Cuban rumba, and the rural punto, as cultivated by peasants of Hispanic descent; aspects of the music bureaucracy in contemporary Cuba; the American music industry's dissemination of Cuban-derived salsa in New York City; Afro-Cuban cult music; the history and current status of charanga dance bands; and more.