Winner: Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC) 2021 Award for Excellence in Best Historical Research on Record Labels and General Recording Topics: Best History
— ARSC Award for Excellence in Best Historical Research on Record Labels and General Recording Topics
"Kyle Barnett’s Record Cultures is an insightful investigation of prewar major and independent record companies as they circumnavigated competitive forces and financial challenges by identifying and exploiting new markets and, eventually, combining with radio and talking pictures for mutual benefit."
—ARSC Journal
— ARSC Journal
"Barnett explores hybridity via Paul Whiteman’s symphonic jazz bands, the intersection of Black music labels and the Harlem Renaissance, and the discovery of 'hillbilly music' via WLS's radio program Barn Dance. The narrative is peppered with interesting facts."
—S. Lenig, CHOICE Connect
— S. Lenig, CHOICE Connect
"Barnett provides an excellent account of a fascinating story. ...Record Cultures should find a home on the shelf of any scholar interested in intermedia studies or the early decades of recorded music."
—Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television
— JOHN LITTLEJOHN, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television
"Record Cultures: The Transformation of the U.S. Recording Industry fills an important gap in scholarship that has been vacant for far too long, and it is an excellent offering that hopefully will spur more conversation about the role of recorded sound in media history."
-Journal of Radio Audio Media
— Len O'Kelly, Journal of Radio & Audio Media
"Barnett has given us the rock and pop pre-history that led as much to Pat Boone and Harry Belafonte as Elvis Presley, demonstrating how long before David Geffen and his crowd appeared the intermediaries were already stoking the talking machinery behind the popular song."
—Journal of the Society of American Music
— Journal of the Society of American Music
"...[Record Cultures] pays close attention to regional specificities, cultural tensions and differentiated industrial practices, while remaining keenly aware of wider moments and movements of convergence. This makes for a diverse, valuable and original companion to existing histories of the phonograph in the US, opening promising avenues for the study of recorded sound in an intermedial and intertemporal context..."
—Popular Music
— Popular Music