Originally an area of New York City between Broadway and 6th Avenue, West 28th Street in particular, where from about 1885 onwards entrepreneurial music publishers such as Thomas Harms and Isadore Whitmark set up businesses to cater for the growing demand for sheet music (in 1887 it is said that up to half a million young people were studying the piano). As well as publishing existing songs the publishers hired composers to write new ones, particularly for the booming Vaudeville shows, and 'song pluggers' to play or sing them in music stores, restaurants and other public places in order to arouse public interest.

The term Tin Pan Alley is said to have been coined by journalist Monroe Rosenfeld to describe the cacophony of clashing notes he heard emanating from scores of pianos as he walked through the vicinity.
Early Tin Pan Alley favourites, for example The Man Who Broke The Bank At Monte Carlo, In The Good Old Summertime and Shine On Harvest Moon were closely associated with music hall, vaudeville and Broadway shows. Later, commercialised ragtime, epitomised by Irving Berlin's 1911 hit Alexander's Ragtime Band, came to the fore, and by the 1920's the Alley's output reflected the shift in popular taste towards material containing jazz and blues influences, although these were largely commercially-driven pop songs rather than the real thing. The majority of the buying public at the time would probably not have known the difference, however.

As phonograph and radio supplanted the piano as the main source of home entertainment the demand for sheet music declined, and by the mid-1930's Tin Pan Alley was virtually a thing of the past. In the minds of Americans however the name remains synonymous with the birth of their music industry, and the place where some of its finest songwriters learned their trade.

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