Record Cultures: The Transformation of the U.S. Recording Industry
(University of Michigan Press, 2020)
Winner, 2021 Award for Excellence
Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC)
Best Historical Research on Record Labels & General Recording Topics
“At last, a scholarly study that integrates the history of phonography with radio and film, to show how the interlocking operations of these key media sectors worked to produce twentieth-century media culture. Solidly researched and full of colorful details.”
Michele Hilmes, University of Wisconsin-Madison
“Record Cultures changes the way we think about US popular music. Pulling back the corporate curtain, Barnett reveals that the infamously opaque ‘culture industry’ was constructed by a collection of music-biz personalities making decisions based on their knowledge of the field or their ignorance about music, a desire to foster new consumers or self-interest as they saw it, and expertise or dumb luck. The result, nevertheless, was the recording, preservation, and transformation of our nation’s music.”
Karl Hagstrom Miller, University of Virginia
Record Cultures is available at a 30% discount via the University of Michigan Press. Code: UMRECORD.
Reviews
"Barnett explores hybridity via Paul Whiteman’s symphonic jazz bands, the intersection of Black music labels and the Harlem Renaissance, and the discovery of 'hillbilly music' via WLS's radio program Barn Dance. The narrative is peppered with interesting facts."
—S. Lenig, CHOICE Connect"Record Cultures: The Transformation of the U.S. Recording Industry fills an important gap in scholarship that has been vacant for far too long, and it is an excellent offering that hopefully will spur more conversation about the role of recorded sound in media history."
-Journal of Radio & Audio Media"Barnett provides an excellent account of a fascinating story. ...Record Cultures should find a home on the shelf of any scholar interested in intermedia studies or the early decades of recorded music."
—Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television"Kyle Barnett’s Record Cultures is an insightful investigation of prewar major and independent record companies as they circumnavigated competitive forces and financial challenges by identifying and exploiting new markets and, eventually, combining with radio and talking pictures for mutual benefit."
—ARSC Journal"...[Record Cultures] pays close attention to regional specificities, cultural tensions and differentiated industrial practices, while remaining keenly aware of wider moments and movements of convergence. This makes for a diverse, valuable and original companion to existing histories of the phonograph in the US, opening promising avenues for the study of recorded sound in an intermedial and intertemporal context..."
—Popular Music"Barnett has given us the rock and pop pre-history that led as much to Pat Boone and Harry Belafonte as Elvis Presley, demonstrating how long before David Geffen and his crowd appeared the intermediaries were already stoking the talking machinery behind the popular song."
—Journal of the Society of American Music