Overview

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.

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9780226151625

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As Taylor shows in The Sounds of Capitalism, the links between American popular music and advertising are longstanding. While he briefly covers the 'prehistory' of the phenomenon in the cries of 13th-century street hawkers recorded in the Montpellier Codex, Taylor's real starting place is radio, which, he argues, is where the marriage between music and advertising was first truly consummated. (n+1)

Author Information

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.

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