Music has been a part of the history of mankind since the beginning of time. This artistic medium has been used as a means to record history, tell stories, or simply provide entertainment. Overtime, the history of music has been complimented by the evolution in the ways with which man is able to listen to the art form. The nineteenth century saw the creation of the first music player, and ever since then, humans have worked to advance the music playing technology to keep up with the demands of society as a whole. With each new advancement came a new type of playing medium, from gramophone to radios, to vinyl, cassettes and CD’s, even to the nearly all-digital era that we are now facing.
Since the dawn of time, “if you wanted to hear music, you had to get out of the house” (Beethoven The Businessman). There was no online database for a person to search their favorite song or album, not even a CD or vinyl record that could be put into a playing console; there was only a venue to travel to in order to hear the music in person. However, this changed around the nineteenth century when the famous composer Beethoven discovered that it was possible to print music, similar in fashion to how books are printed, and sell that sheet music. Because of this, people could access music in an easier way. The need to travel long distances to hear famous composers and musicians was now a thing of the past. People can begin to stay inside their homes and play the music themselves, based off of the sheet music they purchased from the increasingly popular music shops. This simple inquisitive thought that Beethoven had changed the course of history, ultimately paving the way for future technological advancements to increase the accessibility of music for people all around the world.
The rise of printed music allowed people the opportunity to replicate music for them to listen to within their own homes, allowing them to forgo the journey previously needed to hear a musician play their music. However, our desire for easy accessibility was not entirely quenched by this advancement. Thomas Edison cleared the way for the latest achievement when “in 1877…[he] invented his tin-foil phonograph” (Bellis 1). Here, Edison was able to record various sounds onto cylinders. Unfortunately, the quality of the recordings was not something that would have been enjoyed by listeners. This invention and its flaws allowed for an inventor working in America to alter the designs and specifications to create what is now known as the gramophone. Without the invention of the gramophone by Emile Berliner in 1887, the age of recorded sound would not have been made possible. In this latest design, Berliner took the idea of the gramophone, and rather than using cylinders to playback the recorded sounds, he began to “start recording on flat disks or records” (Bellis 2). These records were originally made of glass and had a “spiral groove with sound information etched into” (Bellis 2) it. So, when this record was placed onto the gramophone, there was an arm that would come down which held “a needle that read the grooves in the record by vibration” (Bellis 2), sending the produced sound out of the speaker located inside the device. The way in which Berliner had designed the record allowed for it to be mass produced at a cost affordable by many consumers, unlike the designs presented by prior inventors. To help promote his new technology, Berliner founded “The Gramophone Company” (Bellis 2) and was able to sign two well-known musicians at the time to record and produce their music: Enrico Caruso and Dame Nellie Melba. After finding success with the gramophone, Berliner negotiated an agreement with the Victor Talking Machine Company, more formally known as RCA, to sell “his patent for the gramophone and method of making records” (Bellis 2). This proved to be a valuable move for the music world, as RCA was able to further develop and improve the gramophone technology and ultimately brought the record to bigger and better heights as time continued on. Very quickly, the gramophone and its future variations would become a member of households all around the world, allowing recorded music to be listened to from within the comfort of one’s home rather than venues that would need to be traveled to.
With a thirst for newer and greater technology, combined with the need to have a medium in which information could be quickly and efficiently shared with people all around the world, there was a large decline in the usage of gramophones and an increase in the use of a new piece of musical technology: the radio.
For many years, the radio was a big hit amongst consumers all around the world; they brought people together through the relaying of information and made an ample supply of different types of music readily available to listeners. However, one of the main problems with this form of technology was that it was a mostly stationary means of listening to music-a radio was found in a person’s home, in their car, in the restaurant they went to eat in, but why couldn’t it be found in the pocket of someone as they were walking down the street?
The story of the compact disc, more commonly known as the CD, is one of true entrepreneurial partnership. The idea for the CD came about in the year 1978 as the electronics company Phillips’ failed in its first attempt to develop a video disc technology. The video disc would have been the first to have used “laser technology that could read information from a disc without any physical contact” (“Technology | How the CD was developed.”), differing it from the process commonly used with the vinyl record. While continuing to play around with this idea, Phillip’s was able to design a model that was 20cm in diameter and could play a maximum of one hour of music. Realizing that this may not have been the most feasible option out there, the company made adjustments and brought the model to about “11.5cm-the same size, measured diagonally, as a cassette tape” (Coldewey 2). Now with a workable model in their hands, the developers looked to the rest of the world to see what else was out there in hopes of potentially furthering and perfecting their latest piece of technology. To their surprise, Sony, a company based in Japan, had actually been working on the same product as they were. So, in 1979, Phillips’ headed off to Japan to work with their counterparts to help further the advancement of the CD, which would very quickly become the replacement to cassettes and vinyl records. After about a years-worth of work between “engineers who didn’t know if they could trust each other” (Coldewey 2), the two companies were able to develop a set of universal design standards, formerly known as the “Red Book” (“Technology | How the CD was developed.”), which included Phillips’ “manufacturing process and method of encoding…[and Sony’s] digital error correction that made reading the data reliable” (Coldewey 2). Rumor has it that the disc size of 12cm was ultimately decided because Sony’s Executive Vice President at the time, Norio Ohga, insisted that it be large enough to hold “the longest recorded performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony” (Lynskey 2), a decision that would end up proving to be beneficial in the long run. After years of development and testing, the latest music playing medium was revealed to the world in 1981 on an episode of BBC’s “Tomorrow’s World”. Many engineers and music industry executives were skeptical of the success that the CD would have. In their eyes, the compact disc was an “invitation to gamble millions of dollars on a potential white elephant” (Lynskey 3), but Phillips and Sony were not going to let this phase them. With its own record label backing them, CBS, under the ownership of Phillips, “released the world’s first commercially available CD…Billy Joel’s 52nd Street, in Japan in October 1982” (Lynskey 3). The release of this album led to an immediate success for this new technology; within the first year, “5.5 [million] CD’s and 350,000 [CD] players were sold” (Lynskey 3). Further improvement in the construction of the CD and the devices used to play them were able to bring the price down, making it more readily accessible to the general public for purchase and making it a more viable option for other artists to use as means of producing their music. What started as a hesitant venture between two foreign companies ultimately created a technology that would overtake the music industry for many decades, improving the accessibility of recorded music and furthering the advancement of the music recording sector.
The dawn of the eighties and its transition into the nineties saw arguably the largest increase in music accessibility throughout the world. No longer were people tied to their radio consoles that could be found in either their cars or their homes. Rather, people could now be seen walking down the streets, listening to music on their Walkman’s or other portable CD players of similar fashion. Music had become portable, something that before the creation of the cassette and the CD was not a feasible option. Soon, however, this idea of accessibility began to change as the world was very quickly approaching a new era in music listening technology: all digital formats.
The technological advancement in the history of music: the transition to a digital format of music. Rather than having to go to a music store to buy a physical copy of a CD, consumers can now go onto the internet to listen and buy their favorite music. Easy accessibility was at an all-time high now that music can be accessed by anyone with a computer.