Industry History 101

Now let us be honest here; music itself has been around for centuries. Ancient races and civilizations were singing folk songs around the fire before anyone ever conceived the idea of taking sound and putting it on a device that captured the sound and played it back. Because of this, I feel it is important to start off with a history of recorded music. I promise it is more exciting than you think.

It all starts out a little further back than you would guess, back in the 1870s, when Thomas Edison of all people created what is today known as the phonograph. The phonograph was the first piece of equipment that could record and playback sound and originally used aluminum cylinders to record. This creation was closely followed by the first official recording. The first recording was of The Lord's Prayer in 1884 and was done by Emile Berliner. Three years later in 1887, Berliner discovered that one could not only record sound much more successfully on a disc, but could also mass produce said disc so a greater portion of the world could listen to it.

By the early 1900s, recorded music was a staple of modern society and the next great stride came in 1903 when 12" vinyl records started getting commercial use. As time went by, their popularity only rose as the popularity of the foil cylinders dropped. Then in 1925, it happened. The first electrical recordings were done, which lead to a huge shift in the flow of the industry. Then came WWII and advances in the music world did not stop, only slow down. It was not until 1948 that true-to-life LP's that we know today were created. They remained the best medium for recorded music for years.

Then came stereo recording and stereo LP's in the mid-1950s. In a nutshell, this allowed for isolation of the left and right hand tracks so they could be tweaked separately. This was followed shortly by the inception of the cassette tape in 1963. Cassettes would grow to be an extremely popular format  for recordings over the next few decades. Speaking of recording formats, we now come to the moment in time when vinyl LP's started their slow crawl towards their demise. Compact discs were announced in 1978 and were set to revolutionize the music industry as it was known back then.

Now we fast forward to 1982 when CD's were finally released and slowly began to eclipse records. By the late 1980s, vinyls were all but gone and CD's were known as the future of recorded music. As we moved into the 90s, CD's only became more popular as cassette tapes also started to go the way of vinyls. Time continued to pass and around 1998 is where we will complete this history lesson. In '98 mp3s, or digital music recordings, started to make their way onto the scene, which leads us to where we are presently. CD's are still the main hard copy format of music but they are on their way out. Digital mp3 downloads make up the majority of music purchases as CD sales decline more and more. You now know the past, but what does this mean for the present and future of the industry? Well my pretties, that is a lesson for another day.


Source(s):

MacQuarrie, R., Gu, Y., Guerra, E., Corredor, N., & Hill, W. (2000, April 2). Music 
     cd industry: The history of recorded music. Retrieved from
     http://www.soc.duke.edu/~s142tm01/history.html


Goldman, D. (2010). Music's lost decade: Sales cut in half.CNNMoney, Retrieved from 
     http://money.cnn.com/2010/02/02/news/companies/napster_music_industry/