Marketing and Promotion: the Music Industry in the 40s

R&B came into America’s consciousness because of this new, fresh, strong sounding back-beat that made one want to get up and dance. Many of Louis Jordan’s hits had very catchy, dance-able back-beats peppered with lyrics, themes and topics that were considered R rated at the time in the forties.

Because of the times and because of the attitude towards race records, Louis Jordan, like Cab Calloway before him, was able to escape great controversy over the lyrical topics then they would today. This was all good for a time after the war, that is until the good old, all-American white kids started listening to these “objectionable” race records of R&B and/or Be-Bop jazz in the early 1950s.

America was changing rapidly in the years of post WWII, the lifestyles of middle-class America had more leisure time and more spending money than their parents, who were used to a more conservative lifestyle. Because of this “new way of life”, the youth had more time to explore more creative and alternative lifestyles. This led to the rise of the creative and philosophical “Beatnicks” in the late 1940s and the “rebels without a cause” in the 1950s,

The music industry also started to become a big money-making industry with more investment in promotion and marketing. in the early 50s, as time went on, more and more black artists were getting hits on popular radio and jukeboxes record sales.

It’s funny how quickly the color green (money) would be a catalyst to change corporate America’s practice of excluding artists because of race, starting in the 1950s the record industry would exploit black artists. The record companies would make these new black artists household names while ripping them off out of contractual, publishing and royalty rights.