Publication details
Film a nahrávací průmysl. Případ Ultraphonu
| Title in English | Film and Recording Industry: The Case of Ultraphon |
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| Authors | |
| Year of publication | 2007 |
| Type | Article in Periodical |
| Magazine / Source | Iluminace. Časopis pro teorii, historii a estetiku filmu |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Field | Art, architecture, cultural heritage |
| Keywords | film; recording industry; popular music; synergy |
| Description | In the late 1920s and early 1930s, all key mass media of the time - gramophone, radio and film - went through technological and economical transformation that brought them close together (introduction of electrical gramophone and sound film, radio transformed from the technical novelty into a mass medium). According to Steve Wurtzler, innovations of electrical sound technology challenged traditional conceptions of media specificity and prompted a new kind of synergetic acoustic commodity, "in which a single story, character, song, or other product is made available to consumer in multiple media forms and formats". The transformation started as an attempt of patent-holding companies and their patent pools to exploit their rights in as many commercial applications of electrical acoustic as possible. Thus, new multimedia conglomerates like RCA in the US or Küchenmeister group in Europe were established that covered all sound media of the time. The smaller countries like Czechoslovakia became battlefields of the global conglomerates interacting with each other. However, the local interests emerged as an important agent as well, especially on the level of software. The most important technique, with which the three sound media attempted to address the same audiences and competed or cooperated with each other on the same market, was popular song. As Rick Altman and Jeff Smith argued, the usage of pop song in film - in contrast to classical symphonic film score - has always been a point of negotiation between textual and extratextual interests; it has always kept relative autonomy within filmic text and functioned as a link between different media. The concept of media synergy refers to the mutually advantageous conjunction between film and musical industry. A significant example for that is the Czech Ultraphon label, originally a subsidiary of the Küchenmeister group, but after 1932 the most successful Czech recording company, which was able to capitalize on the structural changes that emerged in the transitional period of the early 1930s by using film music as a key content for cross-promotion between film and radio. In 1930-1945 it published approximately 400 film music records, while 75% of them included tunes from Czech films. Most of film music recorded on discs in the 1930s was put on the Czechoslovak market by companies operating only in loose coordination with the studios. Such coordination didnt function as a conglomeration in economic sense, instead, it had specifically local characteristics and it was based on rather informal social networks, reciprocal services and above all on overlaps between groups of people from various businesses. The main interest of local recording companies was to sell discs with help of films. On the other hand, film companies and artists implemented popular songs into their films in a way allowing them to function as semi-independent commodities and thus as a means of additional publicity and ancillary "profit centers" for exploiting their talent and content. |
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