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The Sounds of Capitalism: Advertising, Music, and the Conquest of Culture. By Timothy D. Taylor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Pp. xx+346. $35.
Although music has been indispensable to modern advertising since the early broadcast era, exactly how music was incorporated into Madison Avenue's bag of tricks has, curiously, escaped the attention of historians. Musicologist Timothy Taylor's The Sounds of Capitalism thus provides a major contribution to the study of American marketing, media,music, and consumer culture. Taylor's account chronicles music's place in advertising between the 1920s and 2000s, with an emphasis on the development of the jingle and the increasingly blurred line separating ad music from pop music. The book is supplemented by a website where readers can access more than eighty audio and video clips. Although Taylor discusses a number of developments in recording technology, his overwhelming interest is in the shifting genres and uses of music in advertising. Blending a cultureindustry approach with Pierre Bourdieu's work on cultural hierarchy, The Sounds of Capitalism is particularly strong in its analysis of advertising music as an industrialized form of expression that nevertheless became...