Where have we come from and where are we going? Do you remember when CDs first appeared in the record shops? Did you have conversations about which was better: CD’s or Vinyl – or even cassettes?
Today the discussions seem to be centred around the relative merits of physical CDs compared to digital downloads or live streaming. In this article we take a look at the development of recorded music over nearly 200 years – and how our listening habits have changed.
Experiments in capturing sound on a recording medium date back to the 1800s. The first effective attempts to record and reproduce sound are usually attributed to Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville’s Phonautograph of 1857. This led to Thomas Edison’s more widely known invention of the Phonograph in 1877.
Despite the poor sound reproduction – they could only capture a narrow segment of the audible sound spectrum – the oldest-known surviving musical recording in Great Britain was of Handel’s choral music on a wax phonograph cylinder on 29 June, 1888, at The Crystal Palace. To our ears today a rater painful and crude curiosity – but the time it was the start of a revolution.
By 1890, it was possible to mass-produce phonograph cylinders which would sell at around fifty cents in the US. These wax cylinders would continue to be used into the 1920s, but at the same time a new configuration of the device meant the cylinder could be created as a disc instead.
The advantages being that it was easier to reproduce as it could be stamped out in a factory. Also, the die could be sent to other parts of the world for ease of reproduction. And so by the 1930s the wind up Gramophone was born, or it was later to be called, the Record Player, or the Turntable.
Records were made out of a heavy and quite brittle shellac compound and ran at 78 revolutions per minute: ‘78s’, but in the 1940s these were to be phased out in favour of 33-rpm (and 45-rpm) records made exclusively of vinyl. The disc or ‘record’ was to dominate the domestic audio market until the end of the 20th century.
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Another wave in audio recording had been quietly developing in Germany – the magnetic tape recording. This provided another dramatic leap in audio fidelity and from 1950 onwards quickly became the standard medium of audio master recording in the radio and music industries.
But the real impact came in 1963 which the Dutch company, Phillips, released its first Compact Cassette (below right). Suddenly this offered a much more robust, portable, affordable and flexible ways of accessing music. Cassettes were available either prerecorded as a Musicassette, or as a fully recordable ‘blank’ cassette. This was to be the start of a nightmare in terms of copyright controls but for the consumer it was the dawn of a new age. For the first time we could copy and record music ourselves. We could even play music when we were on the move: in our cars with a radio cassette player – or when walking along or sitting on the beach with a Sony Walkman.
By the 1980s sales of cassettes were beginning to rival those of vinyl. The sound quality did not ‘wear’ in the same way, they did not warp if not stored correctly, and they were easy to copy for your friends – although the actual tape might sometimes get mangled!
But it wasn’t long before yet another wave of technological development started to emerge and which was to supersede all previous recording technologies, and that was digital sound encoding.
Japanese electronics corporation, Sony launched its first digital Compact Disc CD in the early 1980s. Together with Philips, this quickly became the new standard at every level, from the professional recording studio to the home hi-fi.
We all felt the CD was here to stay. CDs were small, portable and durable, and they could reproduce the entire audible sound spectrum with perfect clarity and no distortion. And because there was no physical contact between the disc and the playback mechanism, CDs could be played over and over, with no degradation or loss of fidelity.
However, by the beginning of the 21st century, developments in computing technology saw the CD rendered virtually redundant by the invention of Digital Audio Files such as .wav, .mp3 and other formats.
Commercial innovations such as Apple’s iTunes, and the iPod portable player have seen an exponential growth in the accessibility of recorded music. Today, just about anything which has ever been recorded can be accessed from your home computer or smartphone.
The widespread unlicensed distribution of audio and other digital media files remains a significant issue for copyright owners. Yet, the development of digital audio has had considerable benefits for consumers and labels.
Consumers could now download and store vast quantities of high-quality digital media and build up collections of music – or videos – which was previously physically and financially impossible to amass in such quantities. This new technology has also powered an explosion in the availability of back-catalog titles with dramatic improvements in the restoration and remastering of acoustic and pre-digital recordings.
But there was more to come…Hot on the heals of downloading music online came music streaming. Now the listener did not even need to own the audio files. Instead, they could simply listen over the internet. This alternative method of consuming music through models such as Spotify and Apple Music increasingly uses AI to respond to what we are listening to and make recommendations as to what we might also like to experience.
Director of Signum Records, Steve Long, has long argued that classical music streaming is a really good thing. (Classical Music 2020 and The Guardian 2019). He is positively enthusiastic about the way the industry has been moving with the evolution of digital technology.
One criticism is that the revenue per stream is so tiny. Yet set against the sheer number of streams each day, hour and minute of the year, the revenue from recorded music as a whole has been going up exponentially year on year since 2016. Even if classical music represents just 3% of the total music market, that still means that the classical music slice is still growing.
Streaming is not going away and is certainly the format of choice for the younger generation, as well as having a cross generational impact on the way classical music is consumed overall.
We have come a long way since vibrating a diaphragm and carving a wax groove to capture sound. Today, by embracing new technologies and opportunities can more doors open for our enjoyment, understanding and access to music.
I long ago sold up my record collection, and more recently my CD collection. All the music I had is now digitised so I can access it anywhere I chose and without clunky machines to play it on – I just use my laptop and bluetooth speakers depending on where I am. Anything else I want I can easily access and stream online.
But I’m sure this is not the end of the story. What will happen next no one really knows. But I think we can certainly agree that nothing stays the same for long.
Bite-Back? We’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Send us a quick message or a longer response about your own personal journey and experiences with recorded music – and where you think we might be heading next!
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Written by Nicholas Keyworth
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Photo credits – all from Wikipedia
1. Edison’s Phonograph 1899 By Norman Bruderhofer, www.cylinder.de – own work (transferred from de:File:Phonograph.jpg), CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=427395
2. Edward Elgar Cello Concerto recording session 1920 By Vol. 12, No. 4, The Early Piano I (Nov., 1984), p. 481., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16967661
3. Portable wind up Gramophone 1930 CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=303095
4. Studer tape recorder, 1960s RFWilmut – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=28110293
5. Philips Cassette Recorder, 1968 By mib18 at German Wikipedia – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6662242
6. Compact Disc By derivative work: Dzucconi (talk)CD_autolev_crop.jpg: Ubern00b – CD_autolev_crop.jpg, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5198534
7. Apple Music icon By Apple Inc. – https://www.apple.com/apple-music/, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=126773502
8. Streaming via an iPhone with bluetooth speakers By https://www.flickr.com/people/alper/ – https://www.flickr.com/photos/alper/3914886029/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=70652582