 | This article needs additional citations for verification. (June 2015) |
World War II was the first conflict to take place in the age of electronically distributed music.
Many people in the war had a pressing need to be able to listen to the radio and 78-rpm shellac records en masse. By 1940, 96.2% of Northeastern American urban households had radio. The lowest American demographic to embrace mass-distributed music, Southern rural families, still had one radio for every two households.[1]
Similar adoption rates and mass distribution of music occurred in Europe. During Nazi rule, radio ownership in Germany rose from 4 to 16 million households.[2] As the major powers entered the war, millions of citizens had home radio devices that did not exist in the First World War.
Therefore, World War II was a unique situation for music and its relationship to warfare. Never before was it possible for not only single songs, but also single recordings of songs to be so widely distributed to the population. Never before had the number of listeners to a single performance (a recording or broadcast production) been so high. Along with that, never before had states had so much power to determine not only what songs were performed and listened to, but also to control the recordings, not allowing local people to alter the songs in their own performances. Though local people still sang and produced songs, this form of music faced serious new competition from centralized electronic music.