Imagine this: You’re feeling suffocated by the silence of quarantine. You’ve been sitting in a silent Zoom breakout room for what seems like an eternity. So, you open your favorite playlist on apps like Spotify, Apple Music, or Youtube Music, and you play some music to cheer yourself up. Apps like Pandora already seem outdated in this age, CDs are historical relics, and cassettes are signals of a bygone era. However, music recording was once an iconic movement, revolutionary for its time.
Before even the phonograph, people strictly performed live. Live performances are costly, but nothing is comparable to the spectacle of a performance that is unreplicable. This was all changed when Thomas Edison invented the phonograph in 1877. The early phonograph used a wax cylinder to record a tune. When a person wishes to record a piece, they play the piece and the sound causes vibrations to go down the bell-shaped horn connected to a stylus. When the cylinder is rotated, the stylus can cut faint grooves into the wax and copy down the sound produced. This was a phenomenal achievement at its time. However, the wax could wear down with use, and the sound could be distorted, making phonographs impractical-and expensive.
Decades later, shellac discs were used to record music. Shellac is a type of tree bug resin. However, these discs were weak and brittle. They could not be mass-produced and transported because the breakage was much too high. It was in the late 1940s that vinyl records were made. These vinyl records (or LPs) look similar to shellacs, but they were reinforced by a lacquer disc and could withstand more pressure and wear. Besides, artists could record songs on both sides of the disc. It was then that music consumption skyrocketed. Consumers saw these new types of vinyl everywhere; jukeboxes were invented to select songs from a collection of records. These vinyl records dominated music production for a good 40 years, until the 1980s, when CDs were invented. However famed the vintage record is, the cassete was created on fifteen years after the vinyl record.
The Philips company invented cassette tapes in Belgium in 1963. This was a groundbreaking change: cassettes were more compact and portable than vinyl records, and listeners could record live shows, albums, their own songs and easily erase recordings and reuse the tapes. Even though cassettes promoted music piracy, it was still a popular recording device among consumers. Listeners could bring a set of cassettes on road trips, and they could be traded and exchanged with friends. Although records were still reasonably popular, cassettes were more affordable and easy to customize. In 1982, however, CDs were introduced in a joint effort between Sony and Phillips to improve music production. CDs: a smaller, almost mini version of an LP record that was much smaller but could hold much more content. An LP could hold 22 minutes on each side, meaning 44 minutes total; however, a CD could hold 74 minutes with higher quality sound. CDs could capture more frequencies, which meant much higher or lower pitches that a producer didn’t include on LP records could be heard in CDs.
In the early 1990s, German electrical engineering student Karlheinz Brandenburg developed MP3 files. Brandenburg was challenged to transmit music over digital phone lines, and in response, he created the MP3 system. However, when the decoding file was leaked, music piracy was back and more popular than ever. It was in 2001 when Apple introduced its iPod that they legitimized MP3 downloads.
Today, we are in the 21st century. We no longer use cassettes or vinyl records. CDs are nearly obsolete, and records are mostly collected as a throwback to the good ol’ days. MP3 downloads are used, but not as much as streaming. Streaming apps introduced a new way of listening to music; listeners no longer needed to download songs that took up valuable digital storage. They could simply open an app and listen to the millions of songs available online-for free. Spotify and Apple Music dominate as the most popular streaming platforms. This seems natural to the Gen Z kids today, but it is a revolutionary step that forever changed the music industry. Perhaps, in the future, someone will invent a way of listening to music even beyond streaming.
Our Socials: