The Books That Sing: The Marketing of Children’s Phonograph Records, 1890–1930

Abstract

Juliet B. Schor has argued that in contemporary American consumer culture, children form the link between advertisers and the “family purse,” and children’s tastes and opinions shape corporate strategies. Schor states that the centrality of children to the consumer marketplace is a relatively recent phenomenon, and that not long ago children were merely “bit players” who were approached by marketers primarily through their mothers (Schor, 2005, p. 9). Schor, like many other scholars, refers to the widespread introduction of television as an important turning point in the development of marketing to children because of the way in which it allowed advertisers a more direct link to young audiences (see Schor, 2005, p. 17, and Kline, 1993, p. 165). However, the work of scholars such as Daniel Cook, Ellen Gruber Garvey, Lisa Jacobson and William Leach has indicated that children were seen as more than “bit players” in home consumption decades before television and even radio. Jacobson argues that middle-class children became targets of advertising more than half a century before television, and warns that identifying the 1950s as “the pivotal historical moment” in marketing to children risks falling into a “technological and economic determinism” that can obscure “a host of earlier efforts to inculcate brand consciousness” (Jacobson, 2004, p. 17).