Northeastern University
Semesters taught: Fall 2026
Course description
This class provides a thorough grounding in the history of the music industry, with an emphasis on the United States. This history starts in the nineteenth century, when many aspects of the modern (Western) music industry took root and blossomed, before moving into topics drawn from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We proceed roughly chronologically, attending to five significant and interweaving themes over the last two hundred years: live music and performance, publishing and copyright, technologies (of creation, recording/production, distribution, and consumption), labor and business structure, and issues of race and genre in the context of market access. By the end of the semester, you will be able to describe important achievements and historical precedents that have shaped the music industry in the U.S., from the nineteenth century through the present day, and relate developments in technology to changes in the music industry (and vice versa) over the last two centuries.
Our learning materials include a variety of sources: scholarly studies, court cases, documentary film, historical documents and scholarship, journalistic pieces, and podcast episodes and radio stories, among others. As we put these different sources in conversation with each other, you will learn how historians and scholars from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds identify appropriate resources and methodologies for researching music industry history. In class, we will assess the reliability and relevance of primary and secondary sources for music industry history research, considering how to mitigate the role that biases play in narrating and reporting history. Your individual writing assignments prepare you for a group project in which, working together, you and your colleagues will retell and reframe complex historical narratives for a more general audience.