None of this is to belittle or deny importance of the phonograph, but rather to suggest a thicker, more multifarious account of the historical development of sound recording and the modern soundscape of capitalism. Music lies at the center of this reinterpretation, because music has had an especially large effect on the form and meanings of the mechanical reproduction of sound generally. In the era of mechanically reproduced sound, the political economy of music rested on the player-piano and the piano, as well as on the phonograph. Scrutinizing the latter, theorists such as Adorno, Attali, and Kittler have done much to draw out the deep interconnectedness of music, sound, technology, and power. They, along with a growing number of number of historians and other scholars, have shown that listening is a culturally constituted practice, with both a politics and an ethics. Too strict a focus on the phonograph has serious consequences, however. It obscures a broader, deeper, more complex set of changes of which the mechanical reproduction of sound was a part.

To be sure, Caruso was hardly the first musical figure to inspire passionate reactions, and his fame had some important antecedents. Jenny Lind and Franz Liszt, for example, both aroused frenzied excitement on their nineteenth- century tours and benefited from shrewd, conscious professional promotion (in Lind’s case by P. T. Barnum, in Liszt’s case by himself ). Toward the end of the century, Paderewski’s towering reputation owed an important debt to Steinway & Sons and the company’s prominent use of his name and image in its advertising. In the same years, John Philip Sousa’s distinctive stature was the work, in part, of his manager David Blakely, whose canny manipulation of the media was thoroughly modern in both conception and execution. Sousa also came across as a distinctly masculine figure, his marches, his martial dress, and his disciplined codes of performance all contributing to a musical style that diverged sharply any characterization of music as essentially feminine.

Caruso’s fame, however, differed from that of earlier celebrated musical performers. Its engine was the promotion of a specific commercial product. In its strong association with advertising and a single manufacturer, it most resembled the relationship between Steinway and Paderewski, but Caruso’s fame was directed with an innovative sophistication and on a scale far beyond what Steinway effected. Moreover, no precedent or analogue existed for Caruso’s impact on the culture and economy of the phonograph. Paderewski was a boon to Steinway, but his in fluence on the perception of pianos, which were already popular and well respected, was marginal. Conversely, Sousa’s band made commercial recordings in the 1890s, but these did not factor strongly into his renown or that of the machine. Indeed, only Caruso’s fame benefited from being systematically advanced through the retail economy of celebrity-based musical merchandise. “The reputation and popularity of Victor artists is a large factor in the merchandising of their Records,” the company explained to dealers, “Their fame is really one of the things you deal in, and yet one that costs you nothing. Therefore, it is to your advantage when that fame is widespread.” Victor’s advice to dealers regarding Caruso was more direct: “Push Caruso—push his great big name (the biggest in the musical firmament) and his wonderful records for all their worth. . . . He is the one artist who stands alone.”