The Sounds of Capitalism: Advertising, Music, and the Conquest of Culture by Timothy D. Taylor (review)

Timothy Taylor’s latest undertaking is the product of over a decade of archival and ethnographic research. For those among us who have followed the progress of Taylor’s research since 2000 through a series of remarkable shorter articles, The Sounds of Capitalism has been eagerly anticipated. It was well worth the wait.

The book covers an enormous swath of history, examining the evolving uses of music in national advertising in the context of parallel developments in mass media, capitalism, and consumption culture in the United States. Chapter 1 begins in the early 1920s, a period Taylor chose because it marked the rapid spread of radio technology in American homes, giving programmers – including advertisers – simultaneous, direct access to millions of listeners. The chapter follows the experiments of national broadcasters and advertisers as they worked to develop new sound-based strategies and adapt old techniques from print to the new medium.

As Taylor notes in Chapter 2, the proliferation of radio ownership through the 1930s coincided with the Great Depression. Consequently, just as their clients were faced with an increasingly challenging market, advertisers worked assiduously to learn more about the specific character of their audiences, and how different listeners responded to different kinds of programming. Through the Great Depression, advertisers became less concerned about intruding upon the privacy and intimacy of the domestic sphere, switching from “soft-sell” tactics like sponsored musical programming intended to generate goodwill, to “hard-sell” methods that pitched products explicitly and aggressively.

Chapters 3 and 5 follow the rise and fall of the jingle as the dominant form of advertising music. A quintessential “hard-sell” strategy, jingles emerged in the 1930s as a direct consequence of the escalation of aggressive advertising that Taylor outlines in the previous chapter. The vogue for jingles spanned sixty years until they fell out of favour during the 1990s – a trend that Taylor attributes to the increasing professionalization, rationalization, and homogenization of jingle composition and production.

In the intervening Chapter 4, Taylor considers advertisers’ increased interest in the 1950s in Freudian psychology, a phenomenon that led to new forms of advertising that sought appeal to consumers on a visceral and emotional, rather than on a rational, level. Advertisers worked to deploy music’s myriad affective qualities, Taylor suggests, using techniques that took advantage of the arrival of television as a newly pervasive mass medium that permitted the juxtaposition of sound and image.

Chapter 6 explores the “discovery” of the youth market in the 1960s. Taylor discusses a number of advertising campaigns – focusing particularly on Pepsi and Coca-Cola – that were addressed specifically to youth and to “those who think young,” to quote the Pepsi tagline of that era. This fetishization of youth culture, Taylor suggests, would become a predominant logic that has structured advertising discourses and practices ever since.

In Chapter 7, Taylor describes the increasingly sophisticated marketing research methods of the 1970s and 1980s – from upc codes to the Nielsen ratings system – that led to new concepts of demographics and psychographics. With exponentially more detail available to them, Taylor proposes that advertisers became increasingly conscious of the value of music as a means to target particular demographics – or market segments – with greater accuracy and effectiveness. As advertisers’ methods continued to improve, and as the 1980s Ronald Reagan administration enacted new discursive and legislative methods to increase consumer spending, consumption ideology was insinuated into virtually every aspect of life in the United States. Taylor focuses on the expanding use of ostensibly underground musical genres – from Nick Drake’s folk songs to the electronic music of Moby and Ben Neill – in order to demonstrate how mainstream, mass advertising has come to a point where advertisers can credibly articulate commodities to countercultural music. With this in mind, he concludes that no aspect of American culture is insulated from the influence of advertising and the ideologies of consumption that it helps to perpetuate.

Taylor’s ninth and final chapter offers...