Vic

I don't think I am confused, though my post might have been.

I am not saying that the 'niche' marketing was a necessarily a bad thing, and maybe it did preserve stuff that might otherwise be lost, just that it was something that continued.

Okeh was a subsidiary of Columbia by 1926, and prior to that was part of another company. Columbia was a 'big' firm. And for me, the fact that they marketing certain music as 'race' music was political, as I am sure you will agree, reflecting political realities of the time, including Jim Crow segregation, but not necessarily the way that American music actually was at the time or the way it developed. The marketing, I believe, helped to form the way that people thought about musical genres.

Companies had specific 'labels' marketing at niches and still did into my youth, when you associated certain sorts of music with certain labels. In the US they even had different 'charts' for different categories of music, some 'racially' based until recently and might still do.

There is a book that goes into this in some detail; you might enjoy it: https://www.dukeupress.edu/Segregating-Sound/

Hope that link works. It is a thought provoking book, and very good on early US folklorists and the racialist thinking behind their work which I referred to earlier.

And the folklore revival was a specific 'niche' which Goldstein as far as I can see both helped to create and then fed the demand for. So I think it is fair to see Goldstein's business practices (and he had two degrees in business) as a continuation of a strategy initially developed earlier in the century.

And in so far as Goldstein 'produced' records featuring Bert and MacCall then these two latter were making a living in part out of participating in what was, to use jargon, a capitalist enterprise, whatever their political motivation for doing this was.

And this, quoted above, sounds like marketing spiel to me:

Thanks to the encouragement of many small successes, Kenneth Goldstein and Riverside have recently issued the boldest single venture yet in their eight double-sided LP set of Child ballads, sung unaccompanied by Ewan MacColl and A. L. Lloyd. It is not, I think, an exaggeration to declare that this is the most important event in the field since the publication of Sharp and Karpeles’ Southern Appalachian collection.The length of many of these versions as sung by MacColl and Lloyd is a new experience, and as such it prompts reconsideration of ballad-form by bringing into sharp focus questions hitherto unasked or but dimly perceived."
Bertrand Harrison Bronson 1957