Music- A Brief History of Music Recording

The recording of sound is as much an art as it is a technology and as with other media there is often a fine balance between the way the technology works and how the artform is captured through the medium. The technology sets the limits for how the art can be captured, and in turn the way the art is created may change to better fit the technology.

Experiments with technology that allowed us to capture sound began in the middle of the 19th century. The oldest sound recording that we still have access to today comes from 1860 France. It is clear that someone is speaking, but no actual words can be made out. The tool used to capture the sound is called a phonoautograph- in a sense “writing sound”. But we see the origins of records in the sense of the phonoautograph scratching the soundwaves out. 

Phonoautograph, 1860

In the early 1900s, we find a recording technology that has mostly gone away--player pianos. Like the phonoautograph, the player piano is completely mechanical and not electric. A talented pianist would record a song on the piano and this would punch notches in a paper scroll. Every open notch on the paper scroll would mean that key was pressed. After recording, the scroll would then allow the player piano to function without a person pressing the keys. For many of the earliest ragtime piano pieces, the player piano was how listeners would have heard how the composer would have interpreted their own piece.

Now we move on to electricity. To simplify an explanation of how sound is captured--think of microphones and speakers as doing similar yet opposite things. A microphone has a magnet, an electrical coil, and a spring-loaded, movable diaphragm. When soundwaves (air) hit the diaphragm the microphone captures the movement. The movement, or pulses, is read as electricity. Speakers have a magnet as well with an electrical coil. The coil is attached to a cone that receives the pulses and amplifies the signal.

The earliest forms of recordings use physical media--meaning something we can touch. 

The first records were wax cylinders that would spin similar to the later discs. Eventually, it was discovered that flat disc records could spin faster than cylinders. The needle on a record player follows the grooves in the record and the record player converts the electric pulses into sound. Here we see a technology limitation that I highlighted in the first paragraph. Because of the RPM (revolutions per minute) or speed of the record player and the diameter of the discs, there was a limited amount of music that could fit on each side of a record. Because of this, songs that were created for and recorded on records would have to be short enough to fit on one side. Even older, classical compositions were recorded by orchestras at faster than usual tempos so that they could fit on a record.

Phonograph Cylinder, 1890s

I do not think that we can overstate how this technology has influenced music. Even today, about 3 and a half minutes sounds normal for a song. Anything longer than that is often the exception for streaming and radio.

Later sound technologies do not seem to have had the staying power of records. The cassette tape was introduced to consumers in the 1960s. Tapes have the advantage of being more compact than records, but did not last as long. The science behind tapes is that the tape itself is magnetic. Another advantage of cassette tapes beyond the smaller size is that tape recorders allowed amateurs to record themselves without the cost of renting a recording studio. This enabled the creation and sharing of music to become more open. It also led to some of the first cases of music piracy, as people would record songs off the radio to share with others.

The last physical media we explore are CDs or compact discs. Instead of electrical signals, the music is digital, meaning the information is saved as 0s and 1s. Another description of CDs is optical media, as a low-powered laser reads the digital information on the disc. CDs became available in the 1980s and were seen as the ultimate solution to music recording and storage. No one could foresee that within a couple decades, owning physical copies of music would become the exception to the rule.

By the end of the 1990s, internet users began experimenting with the ability to upload audio files for others to download. Today, we remember sites like Napster and Limewire more for legal reasons instead of technology or music reasons. Within a brief time, large companies like Apple and Microsoft jumped at the chance to offer music downloads--this time with the legal permissions of the artists and/or publishers. iTunes and the iPod totally changed the way listeners consumed and stored recorded music.

As I write this post, iPods have been replaced by phones that can serve multiple functions and iTunes now focuses on streaming music instead of downloads. Today, streaming is the way that we listen to most music. Streaming really began with YouTube in the 2010s. Music publishers began to notice that most people wanted to listen to music on demand, but did not necessarily want to own a recording of the music. 

Spotify is now the largest streaming music platform with Apple, Youtube, and Amazon competing for a market share of streaming revenue as well. Right now, streaming is a great deal for the platforms making the music available but a terrible deal for the musicians. Buying recordings directly from artists is still the best way to support artists. Right now Spotify pays an artist between $3 and $5 for 1,000 streams meaning that their music has been played on the platform 1,000 times. We can do the math and realize that if you listen to one song from an artist on Spotify, that artist will be paid between .3 cents and .5 cents for that song, or between ⅓ and ½ of a penny. A Spotify Premium subscription is currently $10/month. Clearly, not all of the membership fee is going to the musicians. 

Enough about streaming. Hopefully this article gives you a little insight into the development of recording technology and how that technology has shaped, and still shapes the music we listen to.