Chapter 11
FIR THE AUDIENCE AT HOME:
THE EARLY RECORDING INDUSTRY
AND THE MARKETING OF MUSICAL TASTE
Marsha Siefert
"YOUR VICTOR TALKING MACHINES are all right," said John Philip Sousa. The comment was not exactly an advertiser's dream, but for the fledgling Victor Talking Machine Company, it was their first culturally valuable endorsement, a pragmatic down-home judgment by mainstream America's March King (see Harris, 1990). The endorsement was printed in the second week of January 1902 (Music Trade, p. 45), just a month after the 1900 court injunction against the U.S. manufacture and distribution of the Victor talking machines had been lifted. Sousa's endorsement was backed by something even more valuable: recordings of some of his own marches. The trouble was that he had also recorded for the far and away leading rival, Edison's National Phonograph Company, which all but controlled the market. With a late start, little capital, and legal troubles, the Victor company needed to be more than "all right" to com-pete, especially against a well-known hero-inventor, Thomas A. Edison.

This chapter will analyze how the Victor company, by seeking to competitively market their talking machines, actively participated in "audiencemaking." The story hinges on a technological point: Victor talking machines played only prerecorded discs and Edison phonographs played only cylinders. In 1902 that was a disadvantage to Victor, given Edison's reputation and commercial head start. But this technological advantage could be turned into an advantage if Victor could monopolize a particular type of recorded content and could convince potential cus-tomers that they wanted to hear the content available only on disc. The strategy was to sell talking machines by selling the recordings, which, in turn, required a strategy for selling the content of those recordings.' For several reasons, as this chapter will show, the Victor company chose grand opera as their special content and put tremendous resources into persuad-ing potential customers of the wisdom of this choice. This story, then, tells how the marketers of Victor talking machines used expensive record-ings of European opera singers to merchandize that exclusive content- technology link and, in the process, how they used image and text to discursively transform potential customers into an "audience" for what they called "opera at home."

Victor claimed to have done more than discursively identify a home audience, however. Through advertising and promotional materials, they claimed to have participated in the creation of an actual audience for opera by offering the best star performances to those who might not otherwise attend a live performance. According to Victor, being a member of the home audience for opera was just as good as being at the opera house. In fact, "opera at home" actually had some advantages because the home performances were more convenient and the choice of repertoire was more diverse-if you owned a Victor talking machine. Victor also took credit for increasing the actual audience for live opera performance. Their promotional copy claimed that the creation of a home audience amplified interest in live performance. (Indeed, they assured their most important
opera performers that the live performances and their reproductions were not a substitution for one another, as some promoters had feared.) Live performances, after all, sold records too.

For Victor the link between live performance and its reproduction was essential. The Victor strategy was to use the existing hierarchy of live musical performance-in this case the high prestige of opera-to legitimate their musical reproductions. By linking opera at home to the opera house, the "audience at home" was made analogous to the socially approved, highly prestigious audience in the front row. Opera records legitimized Victor, their recordings, and by extension their home audience, and thereby helped ease the talking machine-and subsequent communication technologies-into the parlors of genteel America.

This chapter will analyze advertising and sales literature to describe how Victor and their competitors attempted to create an "audience at home." Analysis of how an industry shapes, influences, or constructs its potential users, whether they are termed the audience, the market, or the public, is a matter of reasoned argument rather than exact measures. However, a longitudinal view of an industry's printed and proprietary materials, to some extent, can reconstruct what the industry claimed to be doing and, by inference, can reveal how the industry intended to partici-pate in its own "social construction" (see Bijker, Hughes, & Pinch, 1987; Douglas, 1987).

In the late nineteenth century, patent claims, articles in popular science magazines, newspaper accounts, and national magazine stories constituted the published discourse about the various mechanical prototypes of the talking machine. In the first decade of the twentieth century, when the talking machine had begun to be manufactured and distributed on a large scale, that discourse was shared by several streams of published materials: publications within the individual company such as the marketing advice and instruction offered by company memos and house organs that "sell to the sellers"; publications for the industry such as trade magazines, first in music and later in the talking machine industry itself; and publications directed to the potential consumer such as advertising in national magazines and catalogs, brochures, and sales literature. In this study, trade publications are represented by Voice of the Victor and Edison Phonograph Monthly, industry publications by Music Trade Review and later The Talking Machine World, and national consumer publications by the Saturday Evening Post, the fastest growing national weekly magazine of the decade.  This intertextual organizational discourse illustrates how the idea of "audience" was used in a chain of industrial activities that aimed to produce customers for the talking machine.

The story of the talking machine contributes to an understanding of how communication industries engage in audiencemaking by revealing choices that were made in the process of building a particular industry. Too often, audiences are modeled as logical, unproblematic, and uncontested even though stories of the struggles over radio broadcasting (McChesney, 1990) and cable television (Parsons, 1989; Streeter,,19,11,) reveal the commercial broadcasting model of the audienced not to have been inevitable. The introduction of a "new" media technology provided an important site where assumptions and argumentation about the audience are likely to surface, particularly as the invention is developed into a business (see Winston, 1986).

Commercialization of a new technology requires market definition of potential users or purchasers. It also requires positioning of that technology vis-a-vis any existing media technologies that it seems to complement or challenge. It is in this process that the value of a discursive strategy becomes apparent. One way a new technology can be commercialized is to define it, through advertising and marketing techniques, as an "innovation" in an existing technology or industry. The talking machine was positioned, through such techniques, within the music industry. As an "innovation" in home music making, the talking machine could enter an existing market for pianos, sheet music, and other musical instruments. The rhetorical construction of the talking machine as a "musical instrument" therefore allowed its purchasers to be discursively constituted as a 'musical audience" (see Siefert, 1995).

The talking machine is often undervalued in communication histories because it does not fit smoothly into the trajectory of "electrical communication" from telegraph to "wireless." But it is important to the history of audiencemaking through mass communication because it provided an important consumer base for mass-produced home entertainment upon which the radio and televigion industries were built. The talking machine made several important contributions to the definition of the audience for mass-produced home entertainment.

First, the talking machine played a role in the transformation of leisure activity from production into consumption (see Fox & Lears, 1983; Susman, 1973). The availability of professional musical entertainment on records tended to erode the amateur cultivation of talents for producing home entertainment, particularly parlor singing and playing. Advertising for the talking machine industry emphasized the advantage of this transformation as offering the opportunity to hear the "best" in music without the "necessity of constant study or practice" (see H. S. Jones, 1905, p. 9). However, the availability of professional entertainment on records also undermined the appreciation and tolerance for the developmental stages required to produce the "best" entertainment. Turning on the record player required less effort and brought more instantaneous results. And so, music making became music listening.

Second, with a talking machine, listeners no longer needed to be in the presence of strangers to experience professional entertainment. Indeed, talking machine owners were not required to leave home at all. Moreover, by purchasing a record, they could construct, through consumption, their own individualized audience experience. Thus standardized performance on records privatized the experience of musical reception. As Sennett (1978) has argued with reference to other public activities, this change can be conceived as the transformation of the musical audience from a primarily public collectivity, as in the opera house or theater, to a collection of individuals.

Simultaneously, the privatization of musical experience through technology replicated the privatization of that experience through patronage and, later, through the opera "box." The aristocratic box seats privatized the reception of opera to familiars but displayed the listeners to the rest of the audience. In its way, so too did the "music box" known as the talking machine; it privatized musical experience through individual consumption but, as will be shown, left in place an observable hierarchy of cultural value.

Third, by centralizing the reproduction of identical musical performances and commodifying them for home consumption, the talking machine industry assisted in the further nationalization of the musical entertainment industry as a whole. Recording provided musicians with instantaneous national tours on the grooves of shellac. At the same time, the audience for the performances was expanded in size, and the monthly record publications and new record issues emphasized the nationwide sharing of the latest performances. For almost two decades, just a few companies made the same performances available at the same time across the country-a profound form of audiencemaking on a national and, eventually, international scale.

Fourth, by preparing the way for "reproduction" as the normal mode of receiving entertainment, the sound recording industry also affected aesthetic standards and perceptions of music in general (see Siefert, 1995). Listeners became accustomed to hearing mass-produced sound as a normal occurrence in the home, easing the acceptance of the sound quality of early radio broadcasts. Rather than complaining about the sound quality of early recordings, which were advertised as "natural sounding," listeners later demanded that live performances more closely match their reproductions (see Siefert, 1989). The transformation of musical performance into a "technologically mastered" reproduction eventually had a profound impact upon how much music would be composed, produced, and packaged as well as consumed (see S. Jones, 1992).

Finally, the talking machine industry managed to project, through product and discourse, an apparent solution to the tension between American values of democratic access to cultural materials and the achievement of success and distinction. The Victor company's advertising strategy emphasized the democratic nature of the talking machine technology by offering "the world's greatest artists" to all Victor talking machine owners while at the same time providing the opportunity for the display of
discriminating taste through the purchase of (expensively priced and distinctively packaged) high-class" records. Thus Victor's link between technology and its cultural content embodied, in image and prose, the paradox of cultural power in America.

Selling Sound Recording Technology
By the close of the nineteenth century, the "talking machine" industry had two incompatible technological solutions to the problem of sound recording. Edison had announced his cylinder phonograph in 1877. After an initial flurry of publicity in both the popular scientific press and the national magazines, the phonograph languished, in part because it was still too fragile to withstand more than limited public demonstration and in part because, as Edison later explained, he was busy with the electric light (Edison, 1888; Josephson, 1959). Eleven years later, in response to a competing prototype invention,' Edison again went public with his "perfected phonograph," which received the accustomed, attendant publicity.

Edison had originally envisioned his prime market as businesses rather than individual consumers. Buoyed by the successes of the telephone industry, he had proffered his phonograph primarily as a dictating machine to record the "Washington Senate and the New York Press" (Scientific American, November 17, 1877) and had set up a series of companies to market it to business in the late 1880s and early 1890s. The enterprise was defeated by the combination of a strong stenographers' union and the still-fragile mechanism. However, the Washington, D.C., licensee, Columbia, managed to stay afloat by purchasing a patent from the parent company and by identifying a viable market. It seemed that, when cylinder players were placed in public places, individuals were willing to put "a nickel in the slot" to hear a song of their choice.

The second technological solution to sound recording was proposed to the scientific community in the late 1880s: Emile Berliner's disc player. The Phil adelphia-based inventor, using the analogue of a photographic negative, created a sound "record" whose initial advantage was easy reproduction (Berliner, 1888). Unlike the cylinders, which had to be recorded individually by a performer who repeated the selection, the origi-nal disc recording was used to make a "master" from which up to discs could be reproduced. This feature of the disc was attractive to performers and producers for obvious reasons.

The cylinder machine also offered an attractive feature, however. It was capable of recording as well as playing back previously recorded sound. The disc machine could only play back. But what Edison had originally thought would be of most interest to the public-the ability to record sound themselves-turned out to be of little interest. What the public seemed to want, as suggested by nickelodeons, was repeat performances of music.6 Thus, despite the "empowering" potential of the cylinder technology for individualized production of sound recordings, that technology, from its commercial beginnings, was used to constitute audiences.

Although the disc player seemed to have several technological advan-tages, the cylinder player had a head start and one overwhelming advantage: Edison himself. Edison's celebrity as the inventor-hero and his publicized entrepreneurial spirit gave him the ability to raise capital, reach potential distributors, and attract public attention (Wachhorst, 1981). Once he was convinced that individuals might buy phonographs, he determined to make one that they could afford and began marketing cylinder machines and cylinder recordings for individual consumers. Significantly, one of Edison's first models was named "the home phonograph." By 1899 there were 2,763,300 cylinder recordings manufactured in the United States (Sterling & Haight, 1978, table 150-A). And by 1900 the reported value of the sound recording industry was $2 million, surpassing photographic apparatus, which had been available for decades (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1904, p. 315, table 154).

And what of Berliner's disc player? Berliner had brought the gramo-phone to a commercially viable position with the manufacturing aid of Eldridge Johnson, a machine-shop owner in Camden, New Jersey. But by 1898 Berliner's advertising agent in New York had made Berliner's machine all but invisible and in 1900 obtained an injunction to prevent Berliner from distributing his own gramophones (Aldridge, 1964/1983, p. 33). Not coincidentally, the Columbia interests chose this moment to sue Berliner over a patent dispute. When the injunction was finally lifted and the patent adjudicated in their favor late in 1901, Johnson effectively consolidated his and the Berliner interests under the name Victor Talking Machine Company. But having lost almost 5 years on the competition, they seemed to be the victor in name only-except for one small irony. The very events that had kept Victor out of the U.S. market, and thereby forced their dependence upon a British licensee, began to yield unex-pected rewards.

In 1898 the gramophone interests had licensed a separate London company, the Gramophone Company, to assemble gramophone parts imported from the United States.' A key element of the plan was that, although the machine parts were imported, the Gramophone Company would make its own recordings of European musicians. To sell the machines, the Gramophone Company had to convince European custom-ers that their player would play "their music," especially the music preferred by those wealthy enough to purchase the machines. So, with a new London recording studio and a record pressing plant in Hanover, the Gramophone Company began recording, producing, and marketing rec-ognized European musicians.

The success of the London-based Gramophone Company and its other European branches, including Deutsche Grammophon, provided the capital-strapped Victor company with an outlet for U.S.-manufactured gramophone parts during the injunction. Victor also now had access to a large repertoire of hitherto unavailable recorded material: European stars singing opera's "greatest hits." According to subsequent accounts (see Gelatt, 1965), Johnson gambled on a strategy that would link the Victor technology with this prestigious content, thereby differentiating Victor from its American rivals, who sold, in both Europe and the United States, almost exclusively American recordings of American music (Dearling & Dearling, 1984, p. 56). But it remained to be seen whether Victor could identify, reach, and persuade Americans to become grarnophone customers just to have the European opera arias "available only on Victor."

Selling Opera
In early twentieth-century America, selling opera records was not quite as formidable as it might seem to our age and our ears. Touring opera companies and solo artists had spread opera music and opera singing across the country (see Horowitz, 1987, chap. 1). Opera arias were performed in recitals and symphony concerts, as incidental music to theatrical performances, and by mechanical reproduction on music boxes and street pianos. They were also available through best-selling sheet music for the ubiquitous parlor piano (see Loesser, 1954). Even after the establishment of more permanent musical institutions for the performance of complete operas, much operatic music was sung and played in bits and pieces with a mix of other music.

The technological constraints and peculiarities of early sound recording also benefited the popular packaging of opera. Early discs and cylinders could play for a maximum of 2 minutes, much like a music box. Discs were extended to 4 minutes with the introduction of the 12-inch record by 1904, though Edison's cylinder would not last 4 minutes until October 1908 (Gelatt, 1965, p. 163). Thus sound recording continued the nine-teenth-century tradition of the "greatest hits" of opera, usually the arias whose melodies were already in circulation in other musical forms. On record, opera continued to resemble popular songs in length and format.8

Moreover, operatic singing was more amenable to recording than some other musical forms. A trained singer's vibrato (the slight wavering of a tone increasing in volume) recorded well because the force of the vibrato, as amplified through the recording horn, aided the mechanical "etching" of the sound onto the master wax disc. So opera singers sounded good, technologically speaking, especially the tenors whose pitch range fit the best into the tonal registers picked up by the early recording apparatus. And in the absence of electric amplification for live performances, opera vocal style was not unlike the singing style used in other live performances ranging from Gilbert and Sullivan to home-grown musicals. Opera singing therefore was not unfamiliar even to those who heard it rarely.

What sold was not only the singing but the star. Stars had always been central to attracting live audiences to opera performances (see Martorella, 1982, chaps. 2 and 6). In America, European opera singers had been known to have star potential since P. T Barnum's merchandizing of the Swedish opera star Jenny Lind in 1859, and published predictions for the phonograph in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s consistently mentioned opera singers such as Adelina Patti along with Grant and Lincoln as "the voices, to be preserved" (Siefert, 1995). In this pre-Hollywood era, opera stars also represented a world of glamour and high society in national magazine stories. So it was not surprising that Victor recording impresarios, like opera impresarios, recognized the necessity of stars to build a home audience for opera.

But for all these explanations that opera singing was not quite as "foreign" as its sound and language might suggest, opera was still rather limited in live performance relative to other popular forms of musical entertainment. Operatic music in popular form was familiar, but there was little evidence that opera singing would attract large numbers of customers except as a novelty. As a commercial proposition, it was, in fact, risky.

In terms of sales, it turned out to be exactly that. According to a business historian of the music industry, during this period celebrity opera recordings "generally accounted for less than one fifth of all Victor production and about three percent of total disc sales" (Sanjek, 1988, Vol. 2, p. 391). Yet Victor persisted in using opera stars as its primary advertising strategy to sell disc players even into the 1920s. For example, in this important first decade of the cylinder and the disc, almost half Victor's full-page ads in the Saturday Evening Post featured opera singers. The continued use of opera star advertising in the face of such meager sales, it appears, must be explained on broader grounds.

One such explanation draws upon opera's perceived value as cultural capital during this important transitional period in American musical cultural life. In the nineteenth century, the growing professional and middle classes had championed the cultivation of genteel culture as exemplified by such aesthetic sensibilities and attainments as piano playing (see Loesser, 1954; Trachtenberg, 1972, p. 143). This vision of culture for the middle classes was reflected in increased national magazine commentary on cultural events, particularly music and particularly in New York (Musselman, 1971).9 This musical commentary, as Levine (1988) argues, also had the effect of discursively "sacralizing" certain types of musical experiences (primarily symphonic but also opera) and devaluing others. Music critics prescribed not only musical taste but also appropriate audience behavior (Levine, 1988). Promoters of this "higher" culture, while preserving these distinctions, also felt the need to reach out to those who might not yet appreciate these values by "sowing the seeds of culture" in the name of moral order (Levine, 1988, pp. 200, 206).

Sound recording technology offered a democratic way to sow the seeds of culture and to preserve the social order. The hierarchy of cultural values was becoming concretized-literally-in the building of opera houses and symphony halls (DiMaggio, 1986) and other institutions. To those excluded by place and price, sound recording technology offered access, and yet it preserved social order both inside and outside the institutions of live performance. The nouveau riche could purchase cultural capital in the form of real estate: a private box in the "golden horseshoe" at New York's Metropolitan Opera (Davis, 1980; Kolodin, 1953). And middle-class aspirants were told by Victor advertising that they could purchase a reproduction of exactly what was heard there-if they bought a box with a horn.

The Victor strategy for selling opera records domesticated opera's appeal and democratized its accessibility without destroying its value as a mark of "distinction" (Bourdieu, 1984). The Victor company, in pursuing what it perceived to be good business practices, made their records both discursively and physically distinctive and readily available as items of "conspicuous consumption" (Veblen, 1899/1953). By equating sound reproductions to Metropolitan-performed opera, with all its attendant cultural connotations, Victor advertising and sales literature portrayed their customers as the "opera audience at home." And in the process, Victor offered a technological solution to the tension between democracy and distinction in America.

Selling Distinction
The Victor strategy for selling opera records was carefully crafted. In 1900 Johnson added the first paper labels to gramophone disc records. (Previously, recordings were identified only on the cylinder casing or by etching on the mass-produced disc.) The British Gramophone Company picked up on the idea of paper labels, with one addition: The opera recordings would have a distinctive identity-labels of red paper. Thus, through the protective sleeve of the record, the content of the disc continued to be visible after the purchase was made. With the Red Seal recordings, as Johnson called them, the record had only to be seen and not heard to denote the elevated taste of its owner."

For Red Seal records, it was not only the owner's taste that was elevated. Red Seal records cost at least twice as much as other recordings, initially $1 apiece. Rather than justifying the higher cost of these record-ings directly, the Victor company enhanced their implicit value through separate and superior treatment. The first Red Seal catalog, issued in May 1903, was printed lavishly and promoted extensively in national magazine ads. It offered the imported recordings of several stars. By the next year, Victor had set up a Red Seal recording studio at Carnegie Hall and issued a new set of Red Seal opera recordings from "local," Metropolitan Opera stars. In new record lists printed in magazines and newspapers, Red Seal records were always listed separately; and in the yearly catalogs of all Victor recordings, they were eventually listed in a separate section on pink paper.

If the Red Seal signified Culture and Expense, then the Victor trademark, which without exception appeared on all records and ads, signified Everyday Democracy. The familiar trademark, also imported from Britain, was a white terrier with black ears, head cocked in quizzical attention to the black horn of a gramophone, presumably listening to "his master's voice." The mascot was registered by Berliner in 1900, and by 1902 it was used to identify all Victor products and featured prominently in all advertising. The trademark embodied rich connotations of fidelity ranging from the high technical standard of recording that allowed a dog to recognize "his master's voice" to the Anglo-American conception of a dog as man's best friend." Nipper, as he was called, turned out to be the perfect audience icon: He was allowed into parlors, was domesticated, and belonged to no particular class. So the ideal audience for the Victor talking machine was never iconographically constrained by picturing particular human listeners or particular situations.

Another imported ingredient was the voice and face of Victor's best-selling and best-sounding opera star: Enrico Caruso. During spring 1902, this rising tenor of La Scala in Milan had recorded 10 arias for the London Gramophone Company." His recorded, and subsequent live, debut in the United States in 1903 marked the beginning of a sound relationship-literally, financially, and symbolically-between the Victor company and an image of technical and cultural quality. Caruso's voice, in its timbre, range, and method of tone production, was ideally suited for, and demonstrated the potential of, sound recording (Steane, 1974). Moreover, his proven celebrity in the musical world substantiated Victor's claim that its machine was "A Real Musical Instrument" (Saturday Evening Post, January 31, 1903, back cover). Although his success attracted more stars to the Victor opera cast, Caruso reigned supreme in his lifetime and beyond as Victor's cultural endorsement-and best moneymaker.

The terrier and tenor were joined with the red seal of distinction on April 25, 1903, in the first double-page, across-the-fold advertisement in the Saturday Evening Post. The Nipper trademark dominated the spread, surrounded by textual nuggets and nine identified faces of opera stars. 14 The "living voices of the world's greatest artists," as the copy read, "can now be heard, whenever you choose, in your own home." Because "these famous artists have heretofore been heard only in crowded opera houses in the great cities of Europe and America," hearing them reproduced at home would provide an uncrowded, private concert. By extension, the correspondence between the live performance and its reproduction also linked the live audience and the gramophone audience.

The recorded version was not only more convenient-it was just as good as a live performance. Sara Bernhardt as well as Adelina Patti, the most famous diva of the past 20 years, said so: "In listening to the records of Caruso, Plancon, etc., it seemed as if those artists were actually singing in my salons." And "at a reception given under the Queen's patronage, in London, on New Year's Day ... the guests thought that the great Caruso was actually in the room." If the greatest actress, greatest soprano, and the Queen's guests thought that "the greatest tenor in the world" was "in the room," then what more authoritative testimony (or discriminating audience) could be desired. "This is indeed an age of wonders."

The display of opera stars as well as the text, design, and aggressive size of this ad and the choice of national magazine advertising were indicative of Victor's attempts in the years to come to "create desire for the product."15 Johnson, as Victor's president, took a personal interest in the ads, which he later described in an autobiography as "artistic in sentiment as well as practical in effect" (reprinted in Aldridge, 1964/1983, p. 119). Victor may have selected the weekly Saturday Evening Post for some of their most lavish advertising displays in these early years because of the magazine's dramatically rising subscription figures (700,000 by early 1904 and I million by late 1908; Mott, 1957, pp. 691-692). But most if not all of the other national circulation magazines carried these same ads in various sizes and permutations. As witnessed by entries in the Readers Guide and the contents of the Post, editorial content reinforced the operatic substance of these full-page ads, with profiles, interviews,
stories, and reviews by such resident critics as William Armstrong for the Post and William J. Henderson for the monthly Ladies Home Journal, the first magazine with a million subscribers in 1903 (Mott, 1957, p. 545).

The opera star advertisement was not the only type of advertising appeal used by the Victor company but, judging by the Post and other extant advertising samples from other magazines, it was the one that was treated to the most lavish display and frequent emphasis. This analysis is con-firmed by the company's own post hoc analysis:
 

The general problem [of creating desire for the product was] continuously attacked from four separate, carefully ratioed angles: (1) the excellence and superior performance of the product; (2) the pleasure and advantages (en-tertainment and education) of ownership; (3) the availability of the world's best artists; and (4) the gift idea ("the gift that keeps on giving"). The availability of the world's best artists was thought by the company to be the most effective. 17 (Aldridge, 1964/1983, p. 49)

However, these ads were at most one-quarter page and a page. In the same issues, Victor ran a full-page (October 24, p. 33) and often only one sixteenth of a double-page spread (December 5, pp. 28-29) featuring the dog, surrounded by the praise of critics and, of course, a portrait of Caruso. And in 1904, not only did Victor place a profusion of ads announcing the new, recorded-in-America Caruso records complete with dog and Caruso por-trait, they also used a back cover of the Post to publish a facsimile of their exclusive contract with him. Edison ads, while equally frequent, were smaller, and their iconography during this period had only one star: a portrait of Edison's face reflected in the horn.

Selling Distinction to the Sellers
Even though Edison phonographs clearly dominated talking machine sales through 1909 (see Millard, 1990, table 9.1), there were early signs that the Victor challenge was taken seriously-especially Edison's in-auguration of grand opera cylinder recordings in 1906 (see Saturday Evening Post, February 10, 1906, inside cover). "Grand Opera Records a Great Success" proclaimed the Edison Phonograph Monthly in February of 1906: "We are confident that these new records will not only please present owners of Edison Phonographs but attract to the Edison standard many whose musical tastes have kept them from buying because our catalogues have not until now contained high-class compositions compositions sung by artists of the highest rank" (p. 3).

They were also priced lower than Victor's at 75 cents and provided better profit margins. But by December, despite these incentives, the Edison company lamented that they could not "help feeling that the trade in general, especially the smaller dealers, are not paying attention to (the grand opera records] that their high quality deserves" (p. 3).

The Edison Phonograph Monthly sporadically reminded dealers to push these records to people "of cultured tastes" who "seem to think all phonographic music is of the 'coon' variety" (June 1907, p. 10). But these exhortations were primarily textual, almost didactic, and devoid of evidence of sales. And with the exception of reproducing the March 1907 national magazine ad for grand opera records (February 1907, p. 23), the Monthly used no visual items or aids and pictured no stars-with the exception of Edison himself (June 1905, p. 13).

Victor's advertising and sales philosophy, especially with regard to opera records, differed substantially from Edison's. Rather than looking for maximum effect in sales from minimum expenditure, Victor advertised in "every publication for which there was any justification" in part to be perceived in the same way as other important companies of the day (Aldridge, 1964/1983, p. 49). "High-class" records added to that image. In the last of an unprecedented series of four full-page ads in the first year of the new trade magazine The Talking Machine World, Victor proclaimed its philosophy: "There are four Victor pages in this issue. Three show pictures of operatic artists; one shows pictures of popular artists. Three to one-our business is just the other way, and more, too; but there is good advertising in Grand Opera. Are you getting your share?" (The Talking Machine World, October 15, 1905, p. 36).

Their explicit acknowledgment to the trade of opera's relative value in advertising and in actual sales affirms the conclusion that Victor was aiming for image as well as market share. But whatever the parent com-pany's faith in the implicit value of high-culture advertising, the Victor dealers evidently also had some reservations about the sales value of the Red Seal line. In that same year, the New York distributor for Victor was more direct:
 

DON'T FAIL to let every customer hear [the new Caruso records]. Most dealers don't realize how many VICTOR RED SEAL Records are sold. The price seems high until your customer hears them. Then he is surprised to be able to buy such marvelous records at any price. Even those who cannot afford it buy many of them. THESE ARE FACTS-TRY IT.

To aid the dealer, the ad also offered an 11 - by 14-inch picture of Caruso to be sold at $2.50. In May 1906 the company began publishing The Voice of the Victor forits dealers. As compared with the Edison Phonograph Monthly, its lay-out, design, and tone showed some of the graphic sophistication and imagery of Victor advertising. But the Voice was equally impressive for the assistance offered to dealers. In the industrywide journal Talking Machine World, Victor merely offered exhortations; but in the Voice, it offered help in the style and substance of salesmanship.19 "Sales pro-motion," including record catalogues and supplements, instrument cata-logues, and other brochures, constituted about a third of Victor's adver-tising expenditures, which averaged 8.24% of sales for Victor's history (Aldridge, 1964/1983, pp. 49, 75). These materials were distributed to dealers who sold at least $300 worth of merchandise at a cost of about $25 to $35 per dealer. While these dealers were appointed by the distributors, each was recognized individually by the Victor company.

In its first year, for example, the Voice not only offered necessary information on contracts, new records, and so on but also featured the results of its sponsored contests: "How to Increase the Record Business" and "Prize-Winning Window Displays." In addition, new Victor booklets such as "The Victor for Every Day in the Week" recognized "the desirability of reaching families through the junior members" and suggested coordinated window displays (January 1907, p. 9).20 Self-help for dealers also included a "Pronouncing Table of Composers and Singers" that was reprinted from the Victor Opera Index, one of the many handouts and brochures that helped sell opera to the sellers.

Unlike Edison's National Phonograph Company, the Victor company treated opera records consistently, especially through iconography, and built a number of selling aids around the opera records. In addition to the special catalogs and brochures, for example, one of a set of four streetcar cards in the July 1906 Voice pictured the familiar opera cast who "sing only for the Victor" (p. 4). Two Victor "hangers," 25- by 35-inch lithographs, with portraits of grand opera artists and popular artists, were offered to all Victor dealers "who agree to display them conspicuously" (Voice, May 1908, p. 7).

Any doubt about Victor's intended association with grand opera was dispelled in January 1906 with the erection of the "largest and most expensive sign in the world" on the roof of an office building at 37th Street and Broadway. The January 1907 Voice featured day and illuminated night photographs of this 40- by 50-foot reproduction of the Nipper trademark containing 1,000 electric lights. The Voice reported the sign to be a New York City landmark "passed by more people, and by more different people, every week, than probably any other spot in the United States." It was not an accident that the sign was located in the vicinity of the Metropolitan Opera House for its motto was "The Opera at Home."

Caruso also figured largely in these pages: his "Large Profits" on "the costliest songs ever sung in this country" (Voice, June 1906, p. 3), the story of his life (July 1907), and an offer of his life-size figure for dealers' window displays (March 1910, p. 4). His concert tour in spring 1911 was a prime opportunity for advertising, and dealers were to assume a respon-sibility for "the crowding of the theatre or auditorium on the evening of Caruso's appearance as it was never crowded before" (January-February 1911, p. 7). By now, the relationship between the live audience and the home audience had become mutually causal: Reproductions should create desire for the original.

In April 1908 a picture of Caruso "Listening to His Own Voice" on a Victor Victrola inaugurated a series of Voice cover photos lasting for several years that featured opera stars singly or together. (A variant of the photo was also used as the April 17, 1909, back cover of the Saturday Evening Post.) In this photo, Victor iconography had come full circle. Caruso's full-body pose in street clothes portrayed him next to the gramophone with its lid open, his head slightly cocked in a "listening pose." This analog of Nipper listening to "His Master's Voice" carries rich connotations. Not only does the "master" recognize his own voice, but the opera star becomes an individual member of the audience. If the star listens, can the listener at home be less than flattered?

A tribute to Caruso's starring role in the talking machine business was paid by Victor's competitors. In 1909 Edison once again tried to launch grand opera with new operatic tenors and a series of 4-minute Amberol records at $1 to $2 for an Amberola machine costing $200 (Gelatt, 19 p. 162). First was Riccardo Martin, "a remarkably fine tenor voice, bu little inferior to the famous Caruso" (Edison Phonograph Monthly, July 1909, p. 1). Then another tenor, Leo Slezak, was offered on the back cover of the Saturday Evening Post (February 19,1910). During that month, the Edison Phonograph Monthly explained to their dealers how taking care of the two "classes" of customers would equip them "to take out all the profit there is in the business": "While ... the Grand Opera lovers are sav-ing up to buy more Records, the good old 'ragtime-coon-songs-Sousa-Herbert-monologues-sentimental ballads' crowd will still be on the job buying Phonographs of the other styles, and Standard ... Records, until there's frost on the sun" (Edison Phonograph Monthly, February 19 10, p. 1).

Columbia too put forth opera singers-tenors, of course-to challenge Caruso: Constantino, "the great Spanish tenor"; Alessandro Bonci, "the world's greatest tenor"; and John McCormack, "the great Irish tenor" (Pos, October 10, 1909, back cover; November 20, 1909, pp* 21-21; January 15, 1910, back cover). The large size and prominent placement of the advertisements, their timing at the beginning of the opera/Christmas season, and the poses of the tenors all spoke of an intended Caruso challenge. So too did the price of "under a dollar" as compared with the $3 or more price for Caruso. For Victor, on the other hand, it was advertising and business as usual during this period.

For several critical years, however, business really had not been "usual." After the financial panic in fall 1907, sales dropped for all the talking machine companies. The Edison company was having a tough time recov-ering its business. At the end of their respective sales years in 1909, the Victor company had for the first time sold more dollars worth of talking machines (excluding recordings) than Edison (Millard, 1990, table 9. 1). While that figure was only about 25% higher in 1909, by 1910 Victor outsold Edison by 80% on machines alone, with 94,557 sold (Millard, 1990, p. 210).

Some of this success has been attributed to the introduction of the Victrola (see Gelatt, 1965; Millard, 1990, p. 211). The important inno-vation of the Victrola was that the large (and, to many consumers, unsightly) amplifying horn was enclosed in a more genteel cabinet that resembled fine furniture. Introduced in late 1906, the standing cabinet model disc player went into mass production in 1907 and sold for the impressive price of $200. Comparatively speaking, horn-type models, which continued to dominate the Victor sales until 1911, sold for between $15 and $45. It was not until table model Victrolas costing under $100 were introduced (see Aldridge, 1964/1983, App. IV) that the Victrola came into its own. Table Victrolas accounted for about one quarter of all sales in 1910. However, not unlike grand opera records, the very availability of this upscale model and its appeal for the middle-class parlor r151,01bbbbeJ lbr, JVp pf Jbp line-and the name Victrola-for record_players for years to come (Millard, 1990, p. 211).21 By 1910, according to the Edison sales force, the affluent urban markets were "Victrola crazy" (Millard, 1990, p. 212).

Did this luxury machine designed to accompany "high-class" records, along with Caruso's star status, actually mean that the audience for opera records was growing? To judge by Victor's messages to their dealers, they were not any happier than other producers of grand opera: "Red Seal Records have not always been understood by either the Dealer or his customers." Presumably because operas were numerous but expensive and heard only in the large cities, they were impossible to thoroughly understand.

To solve this problem, in April 1911, Victor introduced "Descriptive Labels" on the reverse side of records to explain the story of the aria and sometimes the words. Not only would these descriptions bring "a musical awakening that will make the great operatic arias as familiar in American homes as they are in the music centres of Europe" but they would also give "music lovers an appreciation greater than could be acquired by actually sitting in the opera house or concert hall and hearing the selec-tions by the artists themselves" (Voice of the Victor, March-April 1911,p. 3). Listening to records not only was as good as being in the concert hall but allowed for even greater audience appreciation than actually being there. To persuade the dealers of the importance of their role in this coming  musical awakening, the local dealer was dubbed "the impresario of his neighborhood."

While these descriptive labels did not last long, their informational intent was codified the next year in a more efficient and convenient form, The Victor Book of Opera. Repeating almost verbatim the promise of equal if not greater" music appreciation to be gained from listening to records, the book offered to the "home audience" the "Stories of Seventy Grand Operas, with over Four Hundred Illustrations and Descriptions of Seven Hundred Victor Records." The illustrations were familiar from
Victor advertising: cutout figures of singers and scenes from operas. Several versions of the more famous arias were noted. The cost of the book was 75 cents (50 cents to dealers)-less than the price of one Red Seal record.

Listing 700 records, The Victor Book of Opera provided a guide to consumable opera-a sales tool that kept on selling. Produced as a "fine-book," it appeared as an adjunct to the luxury line of Victor goods. In its advertising copy, Victor described a "widespread recognition of [their] work which has carried these famous operatic records into hundreds of oil thousands of homes where such music was absolutely impossible in any other way," thereby "helping toward America's musical uplift" (Voice,June 1912, pp. 4-5).

In the "Foreword" to the book, Victor again made their claims about the home opera audience, this time to that audience itself:
 

The Victor is an Excellent Substitute for the Opera. For every person who can attend the opera there are a hundred who cannot. However, many thousands of lovers of the opera in the latter class have discovered what a satisfactory substitute the Victor is, for it brings the actual voices of the great singers to the home, with the added advantage that the artist will repeat the favorite aria as many times as may be wished. (Victor Talking Machine Company, 1912, p. 9)

And in much the same way, the text also put the home audience at the center of Victor's cultural contribution. Victor claimed responsibility for the awakened interest in opera in America that had taken opera beyond merely the pastime of the well-to-do in New York City and vicinity":
 

During the recent season several hundred performances of grand opera, at an estimated cost of millions of dollars, were given in the United States. This great outlay for dramatic music alone would not have been possible had it not been for the increased interest aroused in opera by the wide-spread distribution by the Victor during the past ten years of hundreds of thousands of grand opera records, at widely varying prices. (Victor Talking Machine Company, 1912, p. 5)

Victor's resolution of the tension between cultural distinction and democratic accessibility was reiterated and contextualized in a new format for the Victor record catalog inaugurated in 1912. The catalog indexed the whole of Victor's offerings but listed the Red Seal artists (75 opera singers and eight instrumentalists) separately (and, as mentioned before, within a few years the Red Seal section was printed on pink paper). Thus the catalog embodied the three-to-one ratio of all other music to opera recordings in the Victor output while preserving opera's distinctive place.

As "first aid" for New Victor Owners, the catalog listed recommenda-tions for a beginning library: 12 instrumental records (including the 3-record version of the William Tell Overture), 8 standard songs and 8 sacred songs (including a $3 version of "Silent Night" by Ernestine Schumann-Heink), I I popular and musical comedy selections, and, in the largest category, 17 operatic numbers, all "at widely varying prices." Once again, the Victor formula supplied this democratic range of music with a
conspicuous touch of class.

The Consumer & the Audience
Most commentators assign the triumph of the disc over the cylinder to the year 1912. Sales of Victor talking machines had topped the $ 10 million mark and Columbia ceased all cylinder production in that year. Signifi-cantly, in December 1912, the Edison National Phonograph Company introduced its own disc-playing machines to the public (Wile, 1990). The company had begun work on a disc as early as 1909, even though cylinders manufactured in that year outnumbered disc recordings by more than two to one (18,611,200 to 8,572,800). By 1914 less than 4 million cylinders were manufactured as compared with almost 23 million discs from all companies (Sterling & Haight, 1978, table 150-A).

As described here, some of the credit for the technological triumph of the disc must be given to  Victor's product selection, business practices, and advertising strategy. Most narratives of the development of the re-cording industry, even those told from Edison's point of view (Millard, 1990; Read & Welch, 1959/1976), pay tribute to the impact of Caruso, the development of the Victrola, and the quantity of Victor advertising. Memoirs (Gaisberg, 1942; Johnson in Aldridge, 1964/1983), company accounts (Aldridge, 1964/1983; Voice of Victor, June 1912, p. 4), and histories by musically inclined commentators (Gelatt, 1965) put even more stress on the "firsts" in Victor recordings of grand opera. And a simple count of grand opera advertisements suggests that, to quote Victor, "Grand Opera must be Good Advertising." Through July 1910, 6 of the 18 Victor company back covers featured Caruso and/or other opera stars. Of the 30 full-page ads, most in the early years, 14 featured opera stars. And the next most numerous category of full-pagers, holiday ads, also tended to mention the availability of the world's greatest artists. The 1912 advertising campaign featuring Red Seal artists cost $1.5 million (Sanjek, 1988, Vol. 3, p. 26).

So, did these 10 years of expensive, consistent, and ubiquitous Victor advertising create "an audience" for "opera at home"? Here we must return to Sanjek's claim that, during those years when the cylinder accounted for two thirds of all prerecorded music sales, "the Red Seal line generally accounted for less than one fifth of all Victor production and about three percent of total disc sales" (Sanjek, 1988, Vol. 2, p. 391). As Victor continually stressed to its dealers, Red Seal records provided high profit margins despite high artist fees because they sold for so much more* $1.50 for a standard celebfity disc, $3 for a 12-inch Caruso solo, $6 for the quartet from Rigaletto, and $7 for the SeXtet from Lucia-opera recording "firsts" that wereheavily advertised. Nonetheless, 3% is 3%-a figure that includes Caruso's best-selling records. Was it all hyperbole and "high-blown dedication to culture" (Sanjek, 1988, Vol. 2, p. 392)?

In response, one can point to the value of Red Seal records as an entry into an already competitive market and their coupling with the Victrola to sustain the luxury image and market during the recession years of 1907-1908. These records helped Victor establish a history, create a legend, and maintain mission for the company. Moreover, a "backlist" of records that sell over the long term is an industry strategy in use to this day-as attested to by the reissue of Caruso and other Red Seal artists on CD. But 3% is 3%. Can an audience exist without customers? Can an audience exist primarily in discursive terms-the audience for the opera at home?

Even though advertising grand opera was not only uneasy but rather unsuccessful persuasion in terms of actual sales, it had a symbolic function and an influence on certain aspects of American culture that might lend it historical and theoretical importance (see Schudson, 1984). Even if customers had no intention of listening to or purchasing Red Seal recordings, they took them "as proof of [the] quality of Victor's recording technology" (Millard, 1990, p, 201), the very aspect of his own machine of which Edison was most proud (Siefert, 1995), For those who did purchase them, a collection of Red Seal records established one as a person of taste and property. These records could be displayed in the refined American parlor with pride, alongside leather-bound sets Of Dickens, Thackeray, and Oliver Wendell Holmes (Gelatt, 1965, p. 149).

By celebrating opera star Performances, Victor drew on the existing cultural hierarchy for live music of the day to legitimate the talking machine as a "good musical instrument" (see Siefert, 1995).25 The proclaimed distribution of the best performances of the best music, renewed the first of each month with new record announcements in major maga-zines and newspapers, compressed the time between hearing about a performance and actually hearing it. The advertised "firsts"-both in technological developments and in recorde selections—linked “firsts” with “best” in musical achievement. In the cultural values of the day, such promotion of "cultural upliff' was both common and expected; business-men were supposed to embody moral and cultural values.26 Victor's advertising was, then, good business.

Victor's consistent and ubiquitous use of opera in national advertising and promotion materials consolidated and extended nationwide images of musical stars, particularly Caruso. "Mass-producing the moment," in Boorstin's (1973, p. 359) phrase, here meant that performances were shared by those who actually bought the 3%, but it also meant that information about the performances was far more widely distributed. Because performances as well as images could be reproduced nationally, singers could became nationwide stars even if they never came to town. Like Nipper, Caruso entered many American parlors as a culturally valued guest. He was the first star performer to sell a million records (see Millard, 1990, p. 209), although the first million-selling record was that of Alma Gluck singing a concert version of Stephen Foster's "Old Folks at Home" (Sanjek, 1988, Vol. 3, p. 24). For the first decade of the talking machine, despite the more widely available and popular voices from vaudeville and theater, there were few advertised stars other than opera stars.27

The relative fame or importance of stars was hierarchically ranked through record pricing. In addition to the Red Seal of distinction, which was bestowed only on the top opera singers, the various recordings of a particular aria or song by different singers were priced differently. For example, in these years there were four available recordings of "The a Rose of Summer" priced from $5 to $1.50, depending upon the singer. To the consumer, the price differential could represent the fees that a singer demanded and therefore the singer's status in the musical world. The price differential was an implicit critique of the music and an extension of the rankings made by music critics. The cultural hierarchy therefore was commodified as it was made more democratically accessible.

Thus Victor's advertising intersected the discourse on quality and culture. If one important factor in the gradual solidification of a hierarchy of cultural value during the latter nineteenth century was the estab-lishment of institutions for imported culture, then the commercialization of technologies for the reproduction of that culture represented a new and essential element in the discourse of cultural value. The more segmented and categorized audiences became, the more a technology like the talking machine offered a strong cultural appeal. It offered an alternative for the occasional and "unprepared" audience members who might be castigated by the high-culture guardians, while at the same time it satisfied the reformist and educational impulse of those who wished to bring high culture to the masses (see Levine, 1988). Through technology, the talking machine both  circumvented and reinforced the hierarchy of live perforfmance and, by extension, of the audience. And, by using the Metropolitan Opera, the talking machine offered "a sense of place" (see Meyrowitz, 1986) with high cultural value while relating that place to the audience at home.

Sound recording technology fit perfectly into the privatization of behavior and feeling and the transformation of audiences from collectives -to collections of individuals. The listener became part of an audience for professional entertainment that could heretofore only be experienced in the collective of the audience for staged, live entertainment. The avail-ability of professional entertainment in the home for the most part super-seded amateur music making, turning even the intimate, social collectives of family, friends, and suitors who produced entertainment for each other into collections of individual listeners and consumers.

The talking machine privatized musical experience to the level of the family in the parlor and beyond-to the level of the individual listener. In part, this was the result of technical limitations: Acoustic recording simply could not be played back at a loud enough volume to hold the public gramophone concerts" that had often been envisioned. But the easily consumable nature of gramophone discs and the increasing segmentation of audiences for live music fitted remarkably well into the emerging consumer society and into the display of "good taste." At once, there was both the assembly of a national audience of individuals united in their consumption of the best performance and the solidification of the notion that the original live performance had been exactly reproduced (see Benjamin, 1968). With the Red Seal, one could still be "seen" at the
Metropolitan Opera.

Edison resisted Victor's celebrated analogies to the last. Despite losing money, he continued to manufacture cylinders into 1922 (see Siefert,1995). In his notes of 1912, while listening to Caruso's Victor recording of "Testa Adorata" from Leoncavallo's La Boheme, Edison penciled in capital letters: "The phonograph is not an Opera House" (Harvith & Harvith, 1987, p. 13). For the discursive audience, though, perhaps it was.