To Reign in Shellac: Social Fields and the American Recording Industry before World War II

Using a field-theoretic approach to economic sociology, this dissertation provides a revised account of the US recording industry’s rise and consolidation over the first four decades of the twentieth century. A brief introduction, featuring a historical sketch of the industry prior to World War II and an outline of key concepts, is followed by four substantive chapters./nChapter 2 addresses the manufacturing industries of the broader music business and the record and phonograph industry’s changing place therein from 1899 to 1939. Drawing primarily on Census Bureau data, I argue that the development of the industry—including the emergence of a semiautonomous recording industry—is largely explicable via contingent field dynamics (i.e., the struggle among actors within the field), first among the other musical manufactures, and then among phonograph makers themselves. The year 1919 becomes a major inflection point of the industry’s history before World War II, as the erosion of incumbents’ control sets the stage for the replacement of patent control with product diversification as the main means of outflanking competitors. As a corollary, I also argue that the radio industry, commonly cited as the leading threat to the phonograph and record business’ health in the 1920s, has been overestimated as a threat and, furthermore, that demonstrably suspect data has lent credence to this flawed thesis./nBuilding on recent work on the history of the industry, I argue that internal competitive pressures and structural change at the beginning of the interwar period triggered a cascade of developments that expanded a newly-competitive industry’s musical and geographic scope. The focus largely narrows to the 1920s and early 1930s in chapters 3, 4, and 5, as I analyze different aspects of the industry’s response to its destabilization. In chapter 3, I describe how the pitched battle between the leaders and challengers of the field opened up the industry to the nascent blues and country markets. Neither change was the result of straightforward logics of diversification, however, but emerged from a contingent and iterative struggle. These changes were refracted through the institutional logics of the society at large (namely those concerning racial classification and racial segregation) and the preexisting organizational techniques used to seek out and market novel material. The advent of race and hillbilly records, as well as the regional recording sessions that have heretofore seemed so crucial to that advent, were decisively marked by this collision of economic, organizational, and racial prerogatives. Chapter 4 follows up on the racial aspects of the transformation, framing the development of so-called “race records” as the contingent collision of industry prerogatives and Black Americans’ economic mobilization. Using both descriptive and inferential network analysis, in chapter 5 I describe the expansion, contraction, and reconsolidation of the recording location network between the world wars, and test the influence of city attributes and other covariates on the development of recording locations. The relative standing of companies, again, figures most heavily in generating and reproducing the network./nThe dissertation concludes with a brief reconsideration of the foregoing chapters.

Advisor: Fligstein, Neil