Synopses & Reviews
iTunes. Spotify. Pandora. With these brief words one can map the landscape of music today, but these arenandrsquo;t musicians, songs, or anything else actually musicalandmdash;they are products and brands. In this book, Timothy D. Taylor explores just how pervasively capitalism has shaped music over the last few decades. Examining changes in the production, distribution, and consumption of music, he offers an incisive critique of the music industryandrsquo;s shift in focus from creativity to profits, as well as stories of those who are laboring to find and make musical meaning in the shadows of the mainstream cultural industries.
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Taylor explores everything from the branding of musicians to the globalization of music to the emergence of digital technologies in music production and consumption. Drawing on interviews with industry insiders, musicians, and indie label workers, he traces both the constricting forces of bottom-line economics and the revolutionary emergence of the affordable home studio, the global internet, and the mp3 that have shaped music in different ways. A sophisticated analysis of how music is made, repurposed, advertised, sold, pirated, and consumed, Music and Capitalism is a must read for anyone who cares about what they are listening to, how, and why. and#160;and#160;
Review
and#8220;In The Sounds of Capitalism, Timothy D. Taylor presents a rich and compelling story about musicand#8217;s emergence within the broad fields of US advertising and consumer culture. With great clarity and critical acumen, Taylor charts a complex history of the various ways in which advertisers have relied on music in order to sell consumer goods, employing strategies which, over time, have produced a complex semiotics blurring distinctions between the auditory and the material, between taste in music and desire for purchasable things. Taylorand#8217;s book is stunning in its exhaustive accounting of a vast, unexplored territory in US cultural history. And as we read through the tale, we gain something even more: a startling realization of how deeply intertwined our musical values and practices of consumption really are.and#160;The book promises to become a major text in the history of consumption as it establishes a new foundation in the study of US popular music.and#8221;
Review
and#8220;Today, in a business where everyone knows everything, Timothy Taylor has written a scrupulously researched, thoroughly enjoyable history of the wild world of advertising music.
The Sounds of Capitalism is the engrossing story of how the musical face of Americaand#8217;s economy has evolved through the generations; told in the words of those who were there.and#160;This is a landmark book."
Review
and#8220;This strikingly original work skillfully weaves together the authorand#8217;s unmatched knowledge of modern music and perceptive reading of previously untapped sources to reveal how popular music and advertising became mutually dependent industries across a century of change. It will force us to rethink what we know about the popular arts and consumer culture.and#8221;and#160;
Review
"Timothy D. Taylorand#8217;s unique contribution is his application of the historical approach to his subject, tracing, through extensive interviews and archival research, the evolution of music in American advertising from the early days of radio to the present. In doing so, he offers both a thorough and detail-rich history of this increasingly ubiquitous part of American life, and a broader meditation on the politics of sound in contemporary culture."
Review
and#8220;As the musicologist Timothy D. Taylor shows in The Sounds of Capitalism, the links between American popular music and advertising are longstanding. While he briefly covers the and#8220;prehistoryand#8221; of the phenomenon in the cries of 13th-century street hawkers recorded in the Montpellier Codex, Taylorand#8217;s real starting place is radio, which, he argues, is where the marriage between music and advertising was first truly consummated.and#8221;
Review
andldquo;Taylor is to be commended for his organization of the text (which is exhaustively researched and annotated) and accessible writing style, which invite readers into his narrative personably, effortlessly, and enjoyably. His examples ably illustrate his points, and while he competently nods to the scholarly community through his implementation of cultural theory (especially in the last chapter), the clear, jargon-free language in which he has couched his analyses will appeal to a broad audience.andrdquo;
Synopsis
From the early days of radio through the rise of television after World War II to the present, music has been used more and more to sell goods and establish brand identities. And since the 1920s, songs originally written for commercials have become popular songs, and songs written for a popular audience have become irrevocably associated with specific brands and products. Today, musicians move flexibly between the music and advertising worlds, while the line between commercial messages and popular music has become increasingly blurred.
Timothy D. Taylor tracks the use of music in American advertising for nearly a century, from variety shows like The Clicquot Club Eskimos to the rise of the jingle, the postwar upsurge in consumerism, and the more complete fusion of popular music and consumption in the 1980s and after. The Sounds of Capitalism is the first book to tell truly the history of music used in advertising in the United States and is an original contribution to this little-studied part of our cultural history. and#160;
Synopsis
The Chiquita Banana jingle goes back at least as far as 1945, but is still in circulation (with various modifications over time): and#147;Iand#8217;m Chiquita Banana and Iand#8217;ve come to say / I offer good nutrition in a simple way / When you eat a Chiquita youand#8217;ve done your part / To give every single day a healthy start,and#8221; and it goes on to underscore how wholesome and healthy (no fat) this tropical fruit is. and#160;Taylor aims to give us the first history of music in advertising, but also to examine the nature of various forms of American capitalism and the role that consumption has played, and continues to play.
Synopsis
The aim of
Music and Capitalism is to add to the small but now fast-growing number of works that have appeared in the twenty-first century on capitalism in an effort to restore it as an important, and, Tim Taylor would say,
the most important, site of cultural analysis. Taylor has organized this book around concepts and cases that show how Euro-American capitalism works, and has worked, with respect to music. Some of these cases focus on moments when new communications or other technologies appear that altered peopleandrsquo;s relationship to music; various recording and playback devices such as digital recording and playback; and others that address questions of marketing and advertising, for these practices are potent in inflecting or even assigning meanings to commodities of all kinds.
Taylor takes up where Adornoandrsquo;s work left off by studying music in todayandrsquo;s andldquo;new capitalism,andrdquo; which has been powerfully shaped by neoliberal ideologies and policies. Taylor focuses on the new modes of the production and consumption of music, new forms of the marketing of music and musicians, and changes in the cultural industries. These and other themes are treated in this synthetic work that draws on the empirical research Taylor has conducted for nearly two decades on music and technology, the history of broadcast music, the use of music in advertising, and the globalization of popular musics.and#160; It promises to be of interest to anyone with a stake in music.
About the Author
Timothy D. Taylor is professor in the Department of Ethnomusicology and Musicology at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of
Global Pop: World Music, World Markets; Strange Sounds: Music, Technology, and Culture; and
Beyond Exoticism: Western Music and the World. Table of Contents
List of IllustrationsList of ExamplesAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Capitalism, Consumption, Commerce, and MusicChapter 1: Music and Advertising in Early RadioChapter 2: The Classes and the MassesChapter 3: The Great Depression and the Rise of the Radio JingleChapter 4: Music, Mood, and Television: The Discovery and Use of Emotion in Advertising MusicChapter 5: The Industrialization and Standardization of Jingle ProductionChapter 6: The Discovery of YouthChapter 7: Consumption, Corporatization, and Youth in the 1980sChapter 8: Conquering (the) Culture: The Changing Shape of the Cultural Industries in the 1990s and AfterChapter 9: New Capitalism, Creativity, and the New Petite BourgeoisieNotesReferences