Tin Pan Alley
The songwriting and music publishing district centered on 28th Street in Manhattan, and by extension the era of American popular song it produced from the 1880s to 1950s.
In Depth
Tin Pan Alley was both a place and a creative era. The name referred to the section of West 28th Street in New York where music publishers clustered, and the cacophony of pianos being played simultaneously in demo rooms supposedly sounded like tin pans being banged together. The era's songwriters — Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Rodgers and Hart, Jerome Kern — created the Great American Songbook that remains the foundation of jazz and cabaret repertoire.
The Tin Pan Alley system was a song-factory model: publishers employed teams of songwriters who crafted songs to order, song pluggers promoted them to performers, and sheet music sales drove revenue. This system produced thousands of standards with sophisticated harmony, witty lyrics, and memorable melodies. The system declined after rock and roll shifted the industry toward self-contained performer-songwriters, but its legacy endures in the standards sung by every jazz vocalist and in the Broadway musical tradition.
Irving Berlin, the most prolific Tin Pan Alley songwriter, composed over 1,500 songs despite being unable to read music — he played piano only in F-sharp and used a special transposing keyboard to change keys.