Song and System: The Making of American Pop Music

From the first Tin Pan Alley tunes to today’s million-viewstreaming hits, pop songs have been supported and influenced by anincreasingly complex industry that feeds audience demand for itsever-evolving supply of hits.Harvey Rachlin investigates how music entered American homes andestablished a cultural institution that would expand throughout thedecades to become a multibillion dollar industry, weaving a historyof the evolution of pop music in tandem with the music business.Exploding in the 1950s and ’60s with pop stars like Elvis and theBeatles, the music industry used new technologies like televisionto promote live shows and record releases. More recently, thedevelopment of online streaming services has forced the musicindustry to cultivate new promotion, distribution, copyright, andprofit strategies.Pop music and its business have defined our shared culturalhistory. Song and System: The Making of American Pop Music not onlycharts the music that we all know and love but also reveals ouractive participation in its development throughout generations.