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Tin Pan Alley in the Music Industry Context
Tin Pan Alley is a part of Manhattan that was the center of the music industry from the end of the 19th century till the middle of the 20th century. It started to grow approximately in the second part of the 1880th due to the popularity of piano music and more severe laws and restrictions on intellectual property. Their implementation made musicians, composers, publishers, and songwriters work closer together to not violate the newly implemented laws and get financial profits (Rocha Leal). That is why the music industry was centralized first in Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago and, finally, in Manhattan, specifically on West 28th Street, which was later called Tin Pan Alley.
In 1885 the publishing industry migrated to the lower parts of New York, and the majority of publishing houses moved from Union Square to The Flower District, which was soon called Tin Pan Alley. The business side of copyright and publishing was concentrated in this place mainly because it was easier for all people working in the entertainment industry to communicate and observe the newly implemented laws (Rocha Leal). That is why Tin Pan Alley became the center of the US publishing music industry, which helped the publishers strike deals with great speed and enabled them to enhance their songwriting activity (Wooley). Tin Pan Alley helped form and promote the music business in the United States since publishers working there possessed certain powers that enabled them to clearly state and defend their marketing-related interests.
Apart from that, the development of Tin Pan Alley as the core entertainment sector of New York enabled the publishers who worked there to create and promote new genres and songs. The most popular and legendary subculture created by the publishers of Tin Pan Alley was the song plugger (Wooley). It concerned the representation of wares by performing the organizations most recent songs in public. This practice helped the public get familiar with the sound and lyrics and made famous and influential people want to use the songs in their shows. Songs written in Tin Pan Alley were popular among the middle class, and that is why they considered the themes of romantic love or home that were familiar to the representatives of the class.
Since Tin Pan Alley became the core of the entertainment and music industry of the United States, many prolific songwriters and composers were attracted by the opportunities it gave. The most famous composers working at Tin Pan Alley were Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, and George Cohan (Rocha Leal). For instance, Irvin Berlin was one of the most famous Tin Pan Alley composers, whose songs were among the most popular and widely used in Broadway musicals. The song Blue Skies, which he wrote for the Broadway show Betsy in 1926, became a hit and was available for public purchase (Rocha Leal). The song gave tremendous popularity to its author, and it was used in the film The Jazz Singer because of the amount of public recognition and love it possessed.
The Tin Pan Alley composers wrote many songs that later appeared in the musicals on Broadway and Hollywood. One of the major advantages of the Alley was that it was located near Broadway and Hollywood (Rocha Leal). It facilitated the process of communication between publishers and producers who wanted to use songs in their shows. Since the music industry is a very dynamic field and the popularity of genres changes fast, Tin Pan Alley tried to keep up with this speed. That is why many songs written for Broadway or Hollywood were later recorded in jazz style and became even more popular.
The establishment of Tin Pan Alley made it possible to create an environment of extremely creative people who worked together, which boosted the level of songwriting activity. That is why many composers wanted to work there, as the place not only allowed them to gain public recognition and fame but boosted their creativity and inspiration. However, even though songwriters and composers created phenomenal music compositions while working at Tin Pan Alley, their major goal was not music affiliation but making songs a commodity (Wooley). Such policy may be explained by the fact that music was perceived as a means of making profits.
However, with the development of rock-n-roll and the evolution of song-recording technologies, the industry slowly went away from the piano music that was typical of the Tin Pan Alley songs. Music became simple, and musicians did not have to possess a high level of music literacy (Rocha Leal). The era of piano music came to an end, which severely deteriorated the structure of Tin Pan Alley, and by the middle of the 20th century, its influence in the entertainment field was almost lost. However, it is wrong to say that Tin Pan Alley had no impact on the development of the music industry in the US. It allowed the songwriters and composers to make the public love and cherish different music genres and established the prerequisite for music development today.
Works Cited
Rocha Leal, Sheldon. Music Publishing I: Tin Pan Alley Medium, 2018. Web.
Wooley, Nate. The History of Tin Pan Alley Soundamerican. Web.
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