In late 19th century New York City, a host of upstart publishing houses revolutionized American music. Clustered around the handful of blocks that became legendary as “Tin Pan Alley,” these firms shattered existing models of distribution and retailing, selling a fast-changing array of sheet music directly to a vast audience through advertising and live performance. Operating in the years before the mechanically-reproduced media of records and films, the businesses employed “pluggers” to perform their products in the city’s theaters, bars, and streets, using local popularity as a springboard to national distribution. Through their success, they transformed music from a local practice into a mass commodity.
Reliant on the same networks of songwriters, performers, and theaters to create and distribute their products, the firms of Tin Pan Alley tread a careful line, seeking to outmaneuver their rivals without sparking potentially costly conflict. Companies balanced their interest in the popularity of their own publications against the need to support the growth of sheet music sales overall. Similarly, publishers struggled to weigh the importance of buying an effective “push” for their material with the necessity of standing firm against the ever-increasing demands of the Vaudeville syndicates and performers who distributed it. “The Sidewalks of New York” provides a detailed examination of these relations, analyzing the social and business geography of Tin Pan Alley to reconstruct the process by which the loose networks that defined the industry’s earliest days gradually developed into a set of increasingly formalized mechanisms for collaboration. Using published and unpublished autobiographical material, newspapers, trade publications, business correspondence, copyright records, and lyrical analysis, this paper sheds a new light on the dynamic interplay between competition and cooperation that shaped the earliest days of the American music industry.