Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-hc48f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T04:59:38.975Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Selling “The Things Money Can't Buy”: Piano Advertising in the Mid-Twentieth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 February 2019

PAUL MICHAEL COVEY
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This study explores piano advertising strategies after 1940 by examining ads printed in Etude, the Music Magazine between then and 1957, when it discontinued publication. Aware of the emerging US consumer culture, piano companies experimented throughout this period with more aggressive marketing techniques than they had previously used. Because Etude’s intended audience included musicians and enthusiasts of every skill and experience level, it was approached accordingly by advertisers. Thus, we can trace in its pages the development of methodologies that, owing to an increasingly sophisticated understanding of the contemporary range of consumers and their interests, came to target distinct and different market segments. Examination of strategies aimed at the respective groups illuminates an important chapter in the development of twentieth-century advertising while highlighting the piano's special status among consumer products and its cultural associations. Analysis of the industry's strategies in dealing with the mid-twentieth-century US economy reveals contemporary understandings of such associations and their effect on the implications of piano acquisition.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Society for American Music , Volume 13 , Issue 1 , February 2019 , pp. 54 - 77
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for American Music 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Butler, Ralph Starr. “Investigating the Market—Factors to Be Considered.” Printers’ Ink (December 12, 1918).Google Scholar
Casson, Herbert N. Ads and Sales: A Study of Advertising and Selling from the Standpoint of the New Principles of Scientific Management. Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1911.Google Scholar
Cohen, Lizabeth. A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003.Google Scholar
Edwards, Newton. “Population Change in the United States.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 265 (September 1949): 80–91.Google Scholar
The Etude, later Etude, the Music Magazine. Philadelphia, 1883–1957.Google Scholar
Gulbransen, Axel G. “A. G. Gulbransen Issues Call to Arms.” The Music Trades 78 (April 1930).Google Scholar
Laird, Pamela Walker. Advertising Progress: American Business and the Rise of Consumer Marketing. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.Google Scholar
Martineau, Pierre. “Social Classes and Spending Behavior.” Journal of Marketing 23, no. 2 (October 1958): 121–30.Google Scholar
Palmieri, Robert, ed. Encyclopedia of the Piano. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2003.Google Scholar
Roell, Craig. “The Piano in the American Home.” In The Arts and the American Home, 1890–1930, edited by Foy, Jessica H. and Marling, Karal Ann, 85–110. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994.Google Scholar
Roell, Craig. The Piano in America: 1890–1940. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989.Google Scholar
Sivulka, Juliann. Soap, Sex, and Cigarettes. 2nd ed. Boston: Wadsworth, 2012.Google Scholar
Smith, Wendell R. “Product Differentiation and Market Segmentation as Alternative Marketing Strategies.” Journal of Marketing 21, no. 1 (July 1956): 3–8.Google Scholar
Strasser, Susan. Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market. New York: Pantheon Books, 1989.Google Scholar
Taylor, Timothy D. “The Commodification of Music at the Dawn of the Era of ‘Mechanical Music.’” Ethnomusicology 51, no. 2 (Spring–Summer 2007): 281–305.Google Scholar
Thompson, J. Walter. J. Walter Thompson's Illustrated Catalogue of Magazines Compiled for the Use of Advertisers. New York. N.p.: 1887.Google Scholar
Thompson, Warren S. “The Demographic Revolution in the United States.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 262 (March 1949): 62–69.Google Scholar
Whelpton, P. K. “Cohort Analysis of Fertility.” American Sociological Review 14, no. 6 (December 1949): 735–49.Google Scholar
Woofter, T. J. “Factors Sustaining the Birth Rate.” American Sociological Review 14, no. 3 (June 1949): 357–66.Google Scholar