Long Play: Adult-Oriented Popular Music and the Temporal Logics of the Post-War Sound Recording Industry in the USA

Abstract

While the historiography of post-war popular music has tended to emphasize radical musical stylistic breaks and cultural ruptures, industrial continuities between the adult-oriented popular music of the 1950s and the youth-oriented music of the rock era (c. 1967 on) have been overlooked or under-analysed. The article examines the rise of the ‘long-play’ (LP) album as the core commodity of the US sound recording industry, which occurred curing the 1950s (and lasted into the 1980s). For its first two decades, the LP was associated primarily with adult consumers and non-rock forms of music. In this period, the increasing importance of the LP back catalogue led to the development of a particular ‘temporal logic’ for this commodity form. The slower rates of turnover for LPs (as opposed to 45 rpm singles) contributed to the heightened cultural esteem associated with adult albums. The temporal logic of the adult-oriented LP subsequently became crucial to the rise to industrial dominance of rock music from the late 1960s onward.