Voices between the Tracks: Disk Jockeys, Radio, and Popular Music, 1955-60

Abstract

While much historiography on U.S. radio and popular music of the postwar period portrays disk jockeys as having a large degree of freedom, this article challenges this rendition and argues that their autonomy was constrained by a number of institutional and industry pressures. Based on discourses in industry and lay publications, the author argues that disk jockeys were pressured by recording industry largess and station management, which constrained their autonomy and public representations and contradicted the democratic ideology articulated by the U.S. broadcasting industry. Rather than neutral arbiters of public tastes, disk jockeys were complicit in a concerted effort to endow undifferentiated commodities with symbolic capital.

“Making Do in Ways That We Hadn't Done Before”: The Early Popular Music Industry in Perth

“…The connections between major record labels and radio have been investigated in works by Banks (), Killmeier (), and Percival (), and it has been well established that in the 1950s a system operated whereby radio playlists were dictated by major labels. Nichol characterizes this system as: “a kind of cartel, where the record companies decided who would be recorded, and recorded them, and who of those would be released, and when they were released they controlled the exposure of those records.” It was also not uncommon for major labels to buy back stock from retailers in an effort to manipulate charts, whereby artists whose records had been bought back charted higher, in turn prompting greater record sales.…”