Read these brief overviews to learn about the history and impact of sound recordings in the early 20th Century.
Recorded Music in American Life by
Have records, compact discs, and other sound reproduction equipment merely provided American listeners with pleasant diversions, or have more important historical and cultural influences flowed through them? Do recording machines simply capture what's already out there, or is the music somehowtransformed in the dual process of documentation and dissemination? How would our lives be different without these machines? Such are the questions that arise when we stop taking for granted the phenomenon of recorded music and the phonograph itself.Now comes an in-depth cultural history of the phonograph in the United States from 1890 to 1945. William Howland Kenney offers a full account of what he calls "the 78 r.p.m. era"--from the formative early decades in which the giants of the record industry reigned supreme in the absence of radio, tothe postwar proliferation of independent labels, disk jockeys, and changes in popular taste and opinion. By examining the interplay between recorded music and the key social, political, and economic forces in America during the phonograph's rise and fall as the dominant medium of popular recordedsound, he addresses such vital issues as the place of multiculturalism in the phonograph's history, the roles of women as record-player listeners and performers, the belated commercial legitimacy of rhythm-and-blues recordings, the "hit record" phenomenon in the wake of the Great Depression, theorigins of the rock-and-roll revolution, and the shifting place of popular recorded music in America's personal and cultural memories.Throughout the book, Kenney argues that the phonograph and the recording industry served neither to impose a preference for high culture nor a degraded popular taste, but rather expressed a diverse set of sensibilities in which various sorts of people found a new kind of pleasure. To this end,Recorded Music in American Life effectively illustrates how recorded music provided the focus for active recorded sound cultures, in which listeners shared what they heard, and expressed crucial dimensions of their private lives, by way of their involvement with records and record-players.Students and scholars of American music, culture, commerce, and history--as well as fans and collectors interested in this phase of our rich artistic past--will find a great deal of thorough research and fresh scholarship to enjoy in these pages.
Encyclopedia of Recorded Sound by 
Key Changes by
Tells a new story about the history of the music business and the ten technological advances that disrupted it over the last century. In recent years, narratives about the music industry tend to hew to a common theme: it was humming along for decades until the Internet and Napster came along and disrupted it. Key Changes shows that this view is incorrect: the industry was actually shaken up not once in the 1990s, but ten times over more than 100 years. These ten disruptions came with the introduction of new formats for enjoying recorded music: starting with the cylinders and discs played on early phonographs; then moving through radio, LPs, tapes, CDs, television, digital downloads, streaming, and streaming video; and then into Artificial Intelligence (AI), which enables a wide range of new capabilities with profound impacts upon the business. This book devotes a chapter to each of these formats, illustrating how such innovations beget shifts in creativity, consumer behavior, economics, and law. Each of the technological innovations covered in this book not only disrupted the music business, but also fundamentally altered the industry's character. And while the technologies themselves have evolved in unique and varied ways over the decades, the changes within the business follow a clear pattern. Veteran music industry professionals and music technology experts Howie Singer and Bill Rosenblatt illuminate this pattern through a framework they term "the 6 Cs": cutting edge technology, channels of distribution, creators, consumers, cash, copyright. This framework provides insight into how such disparate innovations similarly disrupted and transformed the music business in each era. Extensively researched and supplemented by interviews with Grammy-winning artists, producers and executives, the book provides an insightful perspective on the ways technology has fundamentally altered the music industry, throughout history and into the present era.
America on Record by
With Thomas Edison's invention of the phonograph, the beautiful music that was the preserve of the wealthy became a mass-produced consumer good, cheap enough to be available to all. In 1877 Edison dreamed that one day there would be a talking machine in every home. America on Record: A History of Recorded Sound, first published in 2006, provides a history of sound recording from the first thin sheet of tinfoil that was manipulated into retaining sound to the home recordings of rappers in the 1980s and the high-tech studios of the 1990s. This book examines the important technical developments of acoustic, electric, and digital sound reproduction while outlining the cultural impact of recorded music and movies. This second edition updates the story, describing the digital revolution of sound recording with the rise of computers, Napster, DVD, MP3, and iPod.