Sound recording first became possible in 1877 with Edison’s phonograph invention, a wax cylinder player that could be recorded onto by the user (Morton, 2006). However, for roughly the first twenty years after Edison’s invention, the phonograph mainly served as a dictating machine and a scientific tool (Gronow, 1983). One author claims that the recorded music industry officially started when Louie Glass, president of a west-coast phonograph distributor, set up the first coin-operated phonograph in the Palais Royal Saloon in San Francisco on November 23, 1889 (Morton, 2006, p. 23). As the coin-slot phonographs became more popular to the public, there was a growing demand for pre-recorded cylinders. Edison started making these pre-recorded cylinders for the coin-slot operators, but the archaic copying method available at the time allowed for only 200 or so copies of each recording to be produced. At the same time, Berliner had introduced the Gramophone, which could play back pre-recorded shellac discs but could not be recorded onto (Gronow, 1983). The Victor Talking Machine Company was set up in 1901, using Berliner’s Gramophone patents to produce and distribute players and discs in the US (Morton, 2006). These Gramophone record discs would soon become the preferred format for records, mainly due to the ability for manufacturers to press thousands of copies from one master disc. This is would lead to what Lessig (2008) refers to as a RO, or Read-Only culture.

Introduced to the public as ‘the machine for the millions,’ the home entertainment phonograph was officially released by Edison and Columbia in 1896 (Gronow, 1983, p. 54), marking the beginning of music’s shift from a public event to a private experience. In 1899, 151,000 record players were produced in the United States (Gronow, 1983). Lessig (2008) lays out more numbers, explaining that “fifteen years later, that number had more than tripled to approximately 500,000 units,” with record sales in the US reaching 27 million in 1914. “By the 1920s, between 33 percent and 50 percent of all households had a record player,” and US record sales averaged at 100 million units per year (p. 29). By this time, wax cylinder sales decreased heavily forcing Edison to adopt the Gramophone method of laterally-cut discs (Morton, 2006). While I am focusing mainly on the US recording industry, it is worth mentioning that record sales were seeing growth in other areas of the world as well. In 1915, the Russian record industry sold 20 million copies, while countries like Argentina were importing over 1 million records per year (Gronow, 1983, p. 59-60). By 1929, the UK, Germany, and France were all selling more than 20 million records per year (Gronow, 1983).

Thus, music culture had officially become a “professionalized” culture. “The machines that made this change possible worked their magic through tokens of read-only culture— recordings, or performances captured in some tangible form, and then duplicated and sold by an increasingly concentrated ‘recording’ industry” (Lessig, 2008, p. 29). The nature of copying in these first years of recorded music is essential in understanding why restrictions on copying made sense and were acceptable during this time. The public did not have the means to make copies for mass distribution, thus restrictions on copying did not have a negative impact on the average music listener and the public interest at large.

The great depression began in late 1929, which hit “even deeper in the record business than in the general economy” (Gronow, 1983, p. 64). Not only were people not buying records because of financial issues, but when they did want music and entertainment they went to radio and sound film, two other developments of the time that were gaining significant audiences. Edison’s Entertainment Phonograph division shut down in 1929 due to the depression and the overpowering market share of the Victor Talking Machine Company. It would take about twenty years for the record industry to fully recover, but by the end of World War II in 1945, the US record industry sales were back up to $109 million (Gronow, 1983). For a quick perspective on the growth that was to come in the US recorded music industry over the next fifty years, by 1965 sales were up to $862 million (Gronow, 1983), by 1980 sales hit $3.6 billion (Gronow, 1983), and by 1998 sales reached an astonishing $13.7 billion (Sinha, Machado, & Sellman, 2010). This growth would be made possible by a number of factors including a partnership with radio, an increase in music retail stores, an increasingly consolidated industry owned by fewer companies, and copyright protections that arguably favor corporate interests.

Going back to post-war US in the late 1940′s, the vinyl record is introduced and eventually takes over shellac discs as the most popular format by the 1950′s (Morton, 2006). Both the 12” vinyl discs introduced by Columbia, and the 7” vinyl discs introduced by RCA became the norm, and would continue to dominate recorded music throughout the 50′s, 60′s, and 70′s. Throughout this period of time there were a large amount of independent labels that formed in opposition to the majors. This included labels like Sun Records, who were highly influential in country and rock ‘n’ roll with artists like Johnny Cash and Elvis, as well as labels like Motown who released rhythm ‘n’ blues music by African American artists like Stevie Wonder and the Supremes to commercial success (Escott & Hawkins, 1992). However, many independent labels would eventually be consumed by the majors after massive industry consolidation and conglomeration in the 1980′s.

Philips introduced the compact cassette to the US public in 1964, a format that would allow for audio to be copied and re-copied easily. While the cassette format caught on for recording and copying purposes at home, in studios, at live shows, and in underground tape-trading scenes, it was not until the commercial release of the Walkman in 1979 that cassette tapes would eventually overtake vinyl records as the preferred music format in the 1980′s (Morton, 2006). This marked a turning point for music consumers, as they could now make copies of music for personal use or sharing with friends, or in some cases “bootleg” many copies and sell them illegally. This made a reusable and copyable audio format available to music users for an affordable price, and thus recorded music had become a read-write (RW) medium. “The option to record music onto them made cassette tapes the easiest way to copy, save and share music with friends” (Timmers, 2005, p. 7) This technology that facilitated  home copying was seen as a threat to the recorded music industry, thus the major labels lobbied in Washington for copyright to cover sound recordings. Congress obliged, and the Sound Recording Act of 1971, passed in 1972, officially “published” sound recordings and made them copyrightable.

As we will see in the next section of this paper, digital technologies take the possibilities for sharing to new heights, eliminating scarcity and physical objects from the model, thus allowing one copy to make its way around the globe many times, being copied again and again every time it reaches a new server. This reality will lead to harsher restrictions on copying in the following years.

The cassette tape facilitated a growth in music sharing, with underground tape-trading communities facilitating music distribution for subcultures like punk and hardcore music. These sharing communities were restricted by geographic boundaries, making them much less of a threat to the music industry than future digital technologies would prove to be, while in many cases also serving as an essential promotional tool for independent and “underground” bands. In 1979, the same year that the Walkman was made available to the public, compact discs (CDs) were introduced by Philips. CDs and CD players became commercially available in 1982, marking the beginning of a shift to digital music formats. In 1987, Sony introduced the Digital Audio Tape (DAT) format. DAT machines could record music digitally onto DAT tapes at resolutions that equal or even exceed the sound quality of audio CDs, and were primarily marketed as high-grade machines for studios. The DAT tape and players were the subject of extreme controversy, as the RIAA saw the ability of the machines to make perfect copies as a huge threat to music sales. The RIAA threatened to sue any company selling DAT players in the US, as well as demanding the devices have restrictions on copying copyrighted recorded music. The lobbying by the RIAA failed, and DAT players and tapes were released by Sony in the US. In 1992, the Audio Home Recording Act would impose a tax on all DAT players and tapes sold in the US, as well as cassette tapes and blank CDs, with the majority of the money collected going to the major record labels. Players could be taxed up to $8 per unit, while 3% of the cost of each tape was taxed as well (Duke, 2002). This can be seen as an unfair solution to the music listening public, assuming everyone is using the technology to create illegal copies. The Act also required all DAT players to employ a copy protection system known as Serial Copy Management that would restrict copies made from a master from being copied again. The Act also included the first anti-circumvention laws, which would be expanded upon much more in 1998 with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (Duke, 2002). While DAT players gained popularity in studios for their high-fidelity recording capabilities, they never caught on with average music consumers, mainly due to the high price of devices. Either way, the Digital Audio Tape technology represents the beginning of an ongoing war against the copying of digital music by the RIAA.

Cassette tapes would continue to be the most popular format for consumers up until the early 1990′s. As portable CD players got better and more labels embraced the CD format, CD sales eventually overtook cassette tapes in the early 1990′s. The compact disc remains to be the most sold music format, but sales numbers are dropping dramatically each year, as I will outline later in this paper. It was during this same period of time that home computers with Internet connections were becoming widely adopted by the public, leading to an eventual paradigm shift in the music industry that will change everything.

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By Adam Porter, 2010.