To frame this discussion: music, clearly, predates recorded history. This makes it impossible to say much about its origins, but I would guess humans started making music before true language evolved. It is easy to imagine music being instrumental to the development of language. It is the foundation of theater and dance, its role in practices of faith is fundamental, and it is safe to assume that it has been involved, directly and indirectly, in commerce since there has been such a thing. However music came to be it isn’t going away. But something has been happening to the creation and distribution of music, and it really hasn’t been going on very long.
The first audio recording was made in 1877 by Edison on a tin cylinder: that was 128 years ago. The first format war (disc versus cylinder) broke out soon after; discs won out in the early 1900s. In 1914 ASCAP was formed; its mandate was the 1909 Copyright Act. This is 91 years ago. In the mid-twenties electronics began to overtake pure acoustic technologies, and the 33 1/3 rpm album was developed in 1926, 79 years ago. Another format war, that of speeds (33 1/3, 45 and 78) flared briefly in the late forties, but equipment developments would erase the competitive advantage in cornering a particular format. 45s and 33 1/3 LPs are made and sold to sold to this day: the 78 format fell by the wayside sometime around 1960. Tape media got into the mainstream in the late forties, though it never gained the dominance in audio it gained (however briefly) in video. 33 1/3 LPs had been the dominant audio technology for around sixty years, when they were overtaken by CD revenues in 1988, 17 years ago. The audio CD hit the commercial market in 1983: it’s rise to dominance took only five years.
The CD-ROM drive for digital information storage for computers was developed around the same time as the audio CD but started to seriously impact the personal computer market in the early nineties: a decade ago. Fraunhofer Gesellchaft patented MP3 in 1989: by 1999, just six years ago, it was had become the dominant format for transmitting music via the internet. The CD retains its dominance as an audio recording medium (as opposed to a format), where it has no current serious contender, while in the portable audio market the digital audio player is gaining ground, and the sale of digital audio information only, independent of media, has been gaining a foothold in the market for the past several years.
Although the vinyl record market continues to wane, a smallish independent operator could today get an LP produced for a few dollars a disc, discounting the cost of producing the original recording and packaging. A similar run of CDs might cost 10 - 50 cents a piece. On the same scale, the bandwidth to transmit the uncompressed information contained on that CD over the internet costs would cost pennies - though it is significant that the barrier for consuming the latter option is broadband internet, where the download would take a few minutes, and possession of a reasonably modern computer.
Even so, it’s clear something is going on here.
Over a span of time amounting to less than two human lifetimes the relationship most of us have with music has changed radically. Where previously virtually all music that people heard was live, now the vast majority of music we hear is recorded. Where the music heard was completely acoustic now almost everything we hear is mediated electronically. But what the digital encoding of sound is doing What isn’t clear is what it means, how much it matters, and what can be done about it. I’ve been thinking seriously about these questions for nearly a decade now and this series of articles is my attempt to distill those thoughts into a single, coherent statement for the first time. The massive role music has played in humanity convinces me that what’s going on is important, as does the fact that it is all happening at an amazingly convoluted confluence of art, technology, commerce, culture, and law. Unraveling this knot begins with understanding what recording is and how it’s changed from the latter decades of the Nineteenth Century to the opening of the Twenty-first. That’s the next installment.
this is what is up with this.
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