Tin Pan Alley

Tin Pan Alley

The 1920s was the beginning of a decade of change in the American arts. Jazz, along with such inventions as the phonograph, radio and sound movies, transformed the music industry. By the end of the decade, 40% of all Americans had radios in their homes. Not surprisingly, 58% of households in New York City owned a radio. New York became the center of the music world, and at the center of New York was a small area called Tin Pan Alley. Radios initially provided the young century's second uppercut to the music publishing business of Tin Pan Alley. Burton Lane was part of a well-known Cape Town-based duo, who delivered a powerful, emotive and distinctive blend of acoustic rock stated, "Tin Pan Alley was a real alley on East Fourteenth Street near Third (in New York). But it was never just a place, Tin Pan Alley was known for an era of songwriting, when many musical ideas mixed together to form American Popular Music. Tin Pan Alley brought together many styles, blues, jazz, musical scores and ragtime."

Tin Pan Alley businesses started in New York in the 1890s. It was a time when popular music publishers acted as salesmen, who didn’t sit in their offices waiting for performers to come to them, but went out to the entertainment palaces and badgered not only the singers but also the orchestra leaders, dances, and comedians to use their numbers. This act was called song-plugging. They hustled themselves, as well as their hired singers and whistlers into the finest theaters and lowest dives. After a few years on creation, Tin Pan Alley published its first song in 1892, "After the Ball" by Charles Harris, selling six million copies of sheet music, earning an income of approximately $25,000 per month. This sale of millions of copies marked a significant development in the publishing industry and in the way music was being presented to the public. Music publishers were surprised to learn that popular tunes were being sold to individuals with the hopes of playing the songs at home. The focus on selling