Timothy D. Taylor

iTunes. Spotify. Pandora. With these brief words one can map the landscape of music today, but these aren’t musicians, songs, or anything else actually musical—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 industry’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. 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.

A History of the Present

Music and Capitalism

Western Music and the World (Refiguring American Music)

Beyond Exoticism

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.

Advertising, Music, and the Conquest of Culture

The Sounds of Capitalism

Mark Katz

Tony Grajeda

This reader collects primary documents on the phonograph, cinema, and radio before WWII to show how Americans slowly came to grips with the idea of recorded and mediated sound. Through readings from advertisements, newspaper and magazine articles, popular fiction, correspondence, and sheet music, one gains an understanding of how early-20th-century Americans changed from music makers into consumers.

A Documentary History of Early Phonograph, Cinema, and Radio

Music, Sound, and Technology in America

Timothy Taylor is formalizing and extending the map of today s musical landscape he has recently traced in Music and Capitalism: A History of the Present. He here broadens the time frame to deal with 20th-century as well as 21st-century music, and in order to display the plurality of modes in which globalizing capitalisms have shaped the production and consumption of music, he gives us a set of jewel-like essays. Some of them address the rise of new technologies (such as the player piano, an analog technology, but he also includes digital). Other chapters consider the increased emphasis on taste in the cultural industries, others look at the effects of globalization on the rise in music-making and listening of such concepts as intangible cultural heritage. Taylor is a leading expert on the workings of the music industry, and here he gives us a splendid essay on its efforts to genericize world music, putting it in a place amenable to the needs of broadcasters, advertisers, and filmmakers. And of course he deals with the commodification of music as sound, the employment of sophisticated search systems which enable users to find music they want to hear in a virtual paradise of unlimited quantities of easily accessible recordings, all this while including a chapter on world music festivals. Too, he takes up early 20th-century composers (Stravinsky and Debussy, principal among them) to explore the ways they could hear unfamiliar music as something they could appropriate for use in their own musiccorresponding with the historical rise of finance capital and its ideologies of exchangeability. This book shows how the study of music has suffered a conspicuous absence of analysis of culture and of music and emotion in the West."

Timothy D. Taylor

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