People have been enjoying listening to music ever since Og first banged some stones together and his friend Grog clacked some sticks together. However, for most of history, the only way to enjoy music was to listen to it live. The ability to record sounds and replay them later did not exist until 1877 when Thomas Edison invented the phonograph. This Throwback Thursday, we’re going to go over all of the different formats recorded music has taken over the past near century and a half and how each format has become more portable and slightly more trade-able — minus the music industry’s attempt to force the world to pay them every time anyone so much as hums three notes.
First, we have the phonograph — a stylus that played over a metal cylinder. It was invented in America by Thomas Edison in 1887 as mentioned earlier. However, popular though this format was, it was soon replaced by a shellac disk invented in 1889 (which didn’t make it to the US until 1894). Analog records of various sizes were the most popular and common form of mass-market recording media for music (played on turntable record players) until the eight-track tape made its debut in 1964 which was built into cars, giving it more mass appeal. The eight track tape was replaced with the compact cassette in the 1980s which was replaced, in turn, by the compact disc. Now the CD has been phased out by the MP3 player which is itself being replaced by the smartphone.
For the first one hundred twenty years, music recordings were purely physical in nature. However, over the past thirty, they have slowly become more digital in nature. It will be interesting to see how that impacts both their production and their popularity as time and technology march on.
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