Industrial musical

An industrial musical is a musical performed internally for the employees of a business, to create a feeling of being part of a team, and/or to educate and motivate the management and salespeople to improve sales and profit. It can be used to train staff in regards to public relations, advertising, marketing or corporate image.

Other terms for industrial musicals include the corporate musical or industrial show, but the latter can also refer to trade shows, which are publicity events organized by businesses in a specific industry to promote their products to potential buyers.

Industrial musicals are not restricted to corporations or to businesses involved in industry. They should not be confused with industrial music, or with musicals produced by businesses to be seen by the general public, for example, Disney's stage production of The Lion King.

History

Industrial musicals originated from company songs, anthems and jingles for promoting enthusiasm among workers. The songs were brought in by the management, as opposed to worker-created work songs. Internal musical groups could be formed to encourage company loyalty, keep employees happy, and to help advertise the company to the public. Early 20th century examples include IBM's internal songbook Songs of the IBM, and the Larkin Soap Company which organized community singing and had a women's drum corps, an orchestra, a ukulele club, and daily recitals on a pipe organ.

At some point, a collection of company songs was extended into a full musical theater format, and the industrial musical was born. Many of these musicals were made in North America during the economic boom that followed World War II, and this practice continued into the 1980s.

The earliest known industrial musicals were produced by retail and automotive companies such as Ford, General Motors, and the Marshall Field's chain of department stores. By the end of the 1950s and throughout the 1960s, other types of businesses also began to put on shows.

Businesses could spend a lot of money to produce a musical, hiring talented Broadway composers and lyricists. The pay was very good, the task was challenging, and from the theatre's point of view, the production costs were much higher than a regular Broadway musical. Shows could have as many 30 people in the cast and a 60-piece orchestra. Composer Hank Beebe estimates that the 1957 Chevrolet musical was budgeted at over 3 million dollars (U.S.), because it cost six times the amount it took to bring My Fair Lady to the stage that same year.

The song performances were rarely heard outside of the companies they were written for, but sometimes the employees would be given a souvenir record album. It is largely through these albums that evidence of these shows has survived. Some productions lasted for a limited number of nights, while others traveled from city to city for regional sales meetings.

By the 1980s, industrial musicals were made less and less often. Jonathan Ward, a writer and DJ who collects industrial musical albums, theorizes that the reason for the decline was partially due to rising production costs for stage shows, and the availability of low-cost video and multimedia technology.

Ward thinks another reason for the decline was a change in work attitudes. In the 1950s and 1960s, an employee might have expected to spend the majority of their working career with one company. By the 1980s, employees and the management may have been less inclined to think this way. The feelings of company loyalty and community promoted in the song lyrics would have been met with more cynicism.

Despite the trends that affected industrial musicals, businesses have continued to make company songs. For example, KPMG produced a corporate anthem in 2001 called "Our Vision of Global Strategy."

Titles of industrial musicals

The Shape of Tomorrow — Westinghouse (1958)
Diesel Dazzle — General Motors (1966)
Go Fly A Kite — General Motors (1966)
The Bathrooms Are Coming — American Standard (1969)
Got To Investigate Silicones — General Electric (1973) (about Silicones)

Composers and lyricists

Quotations

"It's an easy thing to write a song about love. It's hard to write a song about spark plugs." — Wilson Stone.
"Do I really want to approach General Electric's army of lawyers with hat in hand and say, 'Would you mind if we put out your in-house propaganda as a kind of funny little project?' I think they would see red flags all over that." — Steve Young, on the possibility of making a commercially-available compilation of songs.

References

Doane, Rex, et al. (2001). Corporate anthems. WNYC's Apr. 7, 2001 broadcast of their radio show, On the Media. An interview with collector Steve Young and others.
Ebenkamp, Becky (2001). Corporate America sings: musical shows about company products. Brandweek, Apr. 23.
International Business Machines Corporation (2004). IBM archives, Music chronology. Retrieved April 3, 2008.
Kalish, Jon (2005). Industrial musicals offer odes to tractors, toilets. (Circulated to many newspapers via Reuters and Internet news sites in March of 2005.)
McLaren, Carrie & Prelinger, Rick (1998). Salesnoise: a timeline of music & advertising. Stay Free 15, 14-23.
Ward, Jonathan (2002). Recruit, train and motivate: the history of the industrial musical. Retrieved April 15, 2005.
Ward, Jonathan (2004). Top 5 musicals produced by the oil industry

External links

Take it from here — Xerox
That's Show Biz! — Goodyear, for a plastic wrap for meats.
Gotta get a car — Oldsmobile
The Grip Of Leadership; People Power — Two musicals for Coca-Cola
Spirit of '66 — JC Penney
A Chevrolet sales convention musical, a film in the Prelinger archives.
Corporate and IT anthems, collected by Peter Judge at Zdnet.