Music Publishers and Recording Companies

When looking through acoustic era recordings, it can be easy to assume that the more common songs we see must have sold well in sheet music sales. While in many cases this was in fact true, it was more likely that the publishers of these songs were connected with the recording studios who made the records. There are always outliers however, sometimes some pieces were recorded everywhere, but the sheet music is very hard to find today. A lot of this doesn’t end up making much sense when you really look into recordings made before 1915. Oftentimes recording companies had more power over what was recorded than we might think. In this I will highlight a few examples and why sheet music sales may not have corresponded to record sales. Throughout the 19th century, the numbers of sheet music sales determined the popularity of any piece. Before the 1840s, sheet music was generally only printed by the hundreds in batches, and if it all sold, another edition would be printed. It was usually quite manageable for publishers at the time, and at the time the major publishers in the United States were in Boston and Philadelphia, not New York. Much of this was changed by the popularity of Stephen Foster and minstrel shows. While the style of music was southern based, it was all being written in New York. Soon Foster’s pieces were being sold by the thousands, so the publishers had to keep up. It