In the 16th century, music was mechanically reproduced in clocks. By the end of the 18th century, music boxes used pins on a revolving cylinder, brushing a steel comb, to reproduce a melody. In 1877, Thomas Edison introduced the mechanical phonograph cylinder, which could record and reproduce sound. Over the next three decades, millions of cylinder sound recordings were sold. Music had entered the age of mechanical reproduction, and would never be the same.
Yet it was still the case, circa 1910, that if one wanted to truly hear music, nothing topped a live performance.
Gramophone records – 78 rpm shellac discs – surpassed cylinders and became the dominant form for musical reproduction until the 1950s. The careers of musicians were created and transformed by the sales of records, but for much of that time records still offered poor reproduction of the aural range and dynamism of live music, for which convenience was substituted.
In 1920, the first electrical recording, using microphones, was issued to the public, of the burial service at Westminster Abbey, London, of the Unknown Warrior. By the 1930s, magnetic tape recorders were feasible. German engineers developed stereo recording by 1941. In the late 1940s, with modifications made to German machines captured in World War II, tape recorders were made commercially available in the U.S.
Through almost all of this time, there was an underlying fact, an event, a performance, that was captured and reproduced in sound recordings, including the sound of a room or studio. But now that changed. Sounds could be assembled. In 1951, Les Paul released “How High the Moon,” wherein he played on eight overdubbed guitar tracks. Music was reproduced that had never been recorded in a unitary performance.
The stereo phonographic disc debuted in 1957. The tape cassette was commercially viable by 1964; by the early 1980s, cassette tapes, with noise reduction to remove hiss, had become the most popular way to listen to music, especially when paired with a small cassette player such as the Sony Walkman. Add headphones and listeners had a good aural experience, nodding their heads to Mike Oldfield’s “Tubular Bells” or Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon,” although there was no longer anything with which to critically compare it.
On Aug. 17, 1982, the first commercially produced compact discs were pressed – the last new, tangible form for recorded music and a leap along the way for digitally made music as well. The disc was “The Visitors,” the eighth and last album by ABBA, pressed at a Philips factory near Hanover, West Germany. It was not much of a hit, but CDs soon were.
By the mid-1990s, there was just a niche market for the old analog standard, vinyl records, which mysteriously endures. While many people correctly understood that digital meant an infinite number of perfect, durable iterations of music, others insisted the older technology has a warmer sound, as does analog recording. (And vinyl records became a fetish; a 2018 survey of British vinyl buyers showed almost half did not own or use a turntable.)
By 1989, CD sales in the U.S. had crested 200 million units per year. They reached their apogee in 2001, at just under a billion units – and have been declining ever since. They are now at about 45 million units a year, the same level as 1984; at this rate, there would be none sold in 2023.
Music escaped the disc to become nakedly, intangibly digital. Now the most common way people hear it is by streaming it. It is everywhere, audible but mostly invisible, perfect, cool – and it does not seem as though it could ever have another container.
