This chapter about the Long Tail (as defined by to Chris Andersson) explores the field of music producers whose work has smaller audiences and how digitalization has shaped their possibilities for pursuing a career in the music business. When introduced in the early 2000s, this model saw an increase of opportunities because of the re-shaping of the distribution of music that made the manufacturing and storing of physical records obsolete. This idea is contrasted with the reality of music producers today as articulated in the interviews of this volume.

This chapter discusses the significance of public broadcasting companies for the development of jazz through a case study investigation of the Swedish situation during the 1960s. By analyzing collaborations between public broadcasters and other actors in the jazz world, I argue that publicly funded radio and television stations changed the jazz scenes that existed outside of the United States. In addition to their societal position and public funding structures, which were common in many European countries, public broadcasters also regarded it as their mission to provide the general public with broad access to music and art. In many cases, public broadcasting companies gave jazz musicians opportunities to experiment, compose, and play styles of jazz that record companies deemed too costly to record and issue. Through this process, jazz became more diasporic as musicians developed alternate forms of jazz and found new modes of dissemination through the networks of public broadcasting and transnational collaborations that were taking place in various European contexts.

By introducing a wider understanding of the discourse of modernism at the time that record covers were introduced, this article investigates record covers as a means through which various actors in the Swedish jazz scene connected jazz with modernist art forms. In the 1950s, specific designs for record sleeves became integrated into the ways in which jazz was mediated in Sweden, which coincided with wider debates about whether jazz could be seen as an art form. The main question of this article is: How did the artwork on record covers influence the acceptance of jazz as an art form in Sweden? In responding to this question, the article aims to demonstrate that, in addition to written discourse, visual objects - in this case record covers - were of great importance to the rising status of jazz in Sweden in the 1950s and 1960s. More broadly, I argue that the visual elements in music cultures can be just as important, if not more so, than written forms of discourse, for negotiating the social status of music.

This article analyzes early Swedish jazz record covers to understand how producers and users comprehended the jazz record as a medium. It employs Jonathan Sterne’s definition of a medium as a social agreement about use. The article shows how, following the transition from shellac to vinyl records in Sweden in the 1950s, record covers reinterpreted the understanding of the jazz record. From seeing a record as a mediation of live music, users and producers started to see the record as an artifact that resulted from artistic work that had taken place in a recording studio.

A book review of Vinyl Freak: Love Letters to a Dying Medium by John Corbett.

Swedish Jazz in the United States: Swede and Cool traces and analyzes the dissemination and reception of jazz from Sweden in the United States during the period of 1947-1963. It maps the networks through which Swedish record companies exchanged recordings with their American counterparts, establishing an American interest in Swedish jazz at a time long regarded as a predominantly American era. Exploring these Swedish-American exchanges—rather than the canonized names in jazz—shines a light on new perspectives in the genre, clarifying the ways in which Swedish jazz was adapted to the American market and how it was understood in an American context. The result is an opportunity to consider the challenges national borders present in a global jazz world while reflecting on the genre’s expanding transnational reach during the 1950s.