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The Effect of Music Recording Technology on the Industry

The Effect of Music Recording Technology on the Industry

Joshua Anderson

Salt Lake Community College

Music is something that has moved and shaped human culture since the dawn of time, but

it wasn’t until the last couple centuries that its powerful grooves were recorded and resold for

leisurely play back. We now have a fifty-one-billion-dollar music industry across the world and

more powerful and accurate recording devices than ever before. The technological advances and

changes to those recording devices have been monumental in the shaping of our current music

industry and its extreme blossom over the course of the last one hundred and fifty years or so.

From the earliest recordings created by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville to the discs of the

gramophone and from the electrical signals collected on tape to the internet streamed hits of our

day, technology has moved the industry in earth shaking ways.

Before the year 1857, the world was a place of live sound. The only way to hear

someone perform or even say something was to be there in the moment and witness it as it

happened. Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville changed it all when he successfully produced the

first audio recording with his Phonautograph. Arguably this didn’t change a whole lot because

he couldn’t play his recording back. All he had done was found a way to trace sound waves onto

smoke blackened paper. Though this doesn’t seem incredible to us, the man set a revolution in

sound technology into motion. Thomas Edison further pushed the envelope in the year 1878 by

bringing forth his phonograph which could both record and reproduce sound. It did so by

scratching sound waves into a tinfoil sheet cylinder. Just a little while later the graphophone was

created, which used wax on a cylinder for recording, and shortly there after the gramophone

came into existence which innovatively changed the wax cylinder into a disc. Both advances

took place just prior to the turn of the century, but how did they influence the industry? Well, as
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The Effect of Music Recording Technology on the Industry

the 1900s kicked off, so to, did the rise of companies producing and selling these records.

Several large companies began to take the lead and sold records across the world. Arguably the

most notable being the Gramophone Company, which is known to have made over two hundred

thousand different recordings from 1898 to 1921. EMI, one of the largest recording companies

today, is a descendant of the pioneering, Gramophone Company.

By this point the industry had already taken several drastic turns due to technological

innovation. It did so again with the introduction of the Vinyl record to the market. RCA Victor

shipped the first, “V-Discs,” to entertain military troops abroad in 1943. By 1948 these new

tapes made of PVC or, “vinyl,” became the standard for all major American record labels. They

were stronger, more durable, and lasted longer than previous sound recording mediums. As this

new technology emerged, music sales continued to rise, and music became more and more

accessible to everyday people. Even though the audience became more broad, the variety of

music producers remained relatively small due to the technicality and high cost required to

record and launch a record. On a side note, world war one and world war two both played

significant roles in setting record sales. The great depression also took its toll on the profits of

the industry at the time.

As vinyl took its place at the top of the music medium food chain, tape recording was

under development and experimentation. Tape recording cartridges were developed in 1930 but

didn’t emerge until far later. A man in Germany initially discovered how to record electrical

signals onto tape but that technology was only used behind the scenes for recording in the 1940’s

and 50’s. It didn’t make it to the public until 1963 when Phillips developed and released the
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The Effect of Music Recording Technology on the Industry

cassette tape. With the advent of tape recording, music production became far less expensive.

With that reduction of cost, the market opened, further allowing for smaller companies to

emerge, capable of putting out records without the help of the large label giants. It also gave rise

to the music piracy phenomenon. People all across the world could now record on their own

using tape recorders, and for a time nothing was off limits. It posed a major threat to the music

industry at large because many people would just borrow a friend’s tape and copy it for

themselves. Luckily, before long, this act of crime became punishable by law, and the crisis

came to a close.

By the late 1970’s, Compact discs began to enter the picture, once again changing the

scene in mind bending ways. In 1982 the first CD was released in Japan and in 1988 CD sales

surpassed LP sales. This new way of recording sound and mass-producing recordings made the

process even easier for countless people across the world. The industry hit all time highs in both

amount of records produced and in money earned. By this point in history, thousands of

companies emerged worldwide. CD’s are still produced and circulated to this day.

A few notable, industry shaping things that have occurred have been far more recent. In

1990 the first MP3s were created and circulated. This took audio and combined it with a

computer file, that could then be shared from computer to computer. People could store and

listen to more music than ever. Then in 1995, RealAudio successfully launched the first audio

streaming service. This made it possible for people to get their music without needing a physical

something to store it! All of the music could be called up whenever it was wanted with the aid of

an internet capable device.

Now days with the ability to record everything digitally, just about anyone with access to

a laptop can produce their own music and even go as far as to release it on their own through

streaming and digital services such as Itunes, Youtube, and Spotify just to name a few. More

voices can be heard than ever before, and any band out there has the potential of making it

without the aid of the major music labels. Of coarse having major studio backing is still a huge

help seeing as about half of the world’s records are produced by half a dozen huge international

companies. I have first hand experience in this field, seeing as my major used to be, music

recording technology. I can attest that it doesn’t take much training or understanding anymore to

produce high quality material and even the phones we carry around in our pockets have more

powerful recording software and mic technology on them than those technologies that were

available just 40 or 50 years ago!

In conclusion, the movements in technology have generated major changes to the way the

music industry behaves and operates. The music industry has grown and blossomed from one

man making squiggly lines on a piece of paper with the vibration of sound waves recorded by a

large primitive machine, to everyone and their dog creating high quality sound reproductions

with nothing but a few cheap mics and a soft ware program. Times have certainly changed and

now the industry stretches to every last corner of the world and sells more records than our

ancestors could have ever imagined.

Works Cited

Sound Recording History (n.d.). Brief History of Sound Recording. Retrieved from:

http://www.soundrecordinghistory.net/

EMI Archive Trust (n.d.). History of recorded music timeline. Retrieved from:

https://www.emiarchivetrust.org/about/history-of-recording/

Callie Taintor (n.d.) Chronology: technology and the music industry. Retrieved from:

(https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/music/inside/cron.html

International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives (n.d.). A brief history of the record

industry. Retrieved from: https://www.iasa-web.org/sound-archives/brief-history-record-industry

Statista (n.d.) U.S. music statistics and facts. Retrieved from:

https://www.statista.com/topics/1639/music/