FROM THEORY AND PRACTISE TO SALES AND DISTRIBUTION: HOW IS MUSIC PRESENTED IN A PHYSICAL FORM?
The oldest physical medium on which music was first recorded and kept was ‘long plays’, which were discs played by a phonograph, later called the record player, then the turntable. The phonograph (the word comes from Ancient Greek and means 'sound writing') appeared in 1877 and was at first mechanical. The first phonographs were made by Thomas Edison. Another American engineer, Emile Berliner, created similar machines called phonographs or Gramophones (from the name of the trademark).
Edison was an engineer and also an entrepreneur. In 1896, he founded the National Phonograph Company (Thomas A. Edison, Inc.) to produce a phonograph for every American house (as he said) and Edison Records began to make the corresponding discs. The company stopped operating in 1957 (bought by McGraw Electric, it became a general manufacturer of electrical products).
In 1901, Berliner founded his own record company to produce his own devices and vinyls: the Victor Talking Machine Company. That company was bought in 1929 by General Electric (founded by Thomas Edison) and became RCA Records. RCA Records was sold to another company, Sony Music Entertainment (part of the Japanese company Sony Corporation), in 1985. Let us notice that Victor Records recorded classical musicians like Sergei Rachmaninoff but also Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family, the founders of country music.
The phonographs soon became electrical and later portable. Their forms varied a lot through time - the most obvious change being the disappearance of the bell or horn. The manufacturing of phonographic discs also evolved over the decades. Discs were first made with metal, shellac, wax and later with thermoplastic materials. These last products were known as 'vinyls' and were produced massively from the 1950s to the 1990s.
The discs became more and more reliable, durable and lightweight: the first disc for phonograph could contain only some minutes of music, the latest vinyls offered more than one hour of music. From the beginning, the marketing around phonographs and phonographic records was particularly strong. Edison himself was an evangelist for his own products, saying : 'I want to see a Phonograph in every American home!' and his company offered free trials to create demand. Also, the sleeves of the records, for example those made by Victor, were considered by fans as artwork.
After the arrival of the compact disc, vinyls nearly died out, althought it experienced some 'revival' during the years 2010s as a trendy 'retro' product. The compact disc was invented in 1966 by the American inventor James T. Russell, who protected his inventions by using patents. The compact disc was the first system to record digital information on an optical transparent foil whose contents is read by a powerful halogen lamp.
A Canadian company (Optical Recording Corps) and after that, two big corporations, Sony Corporation (Japan) and Philips N.V. (Netherlands), licensed Russell's patents. The two last companies engaged creative engineers to design a disc based on the technology invented by Russell. The first prototypes appeared in 1974. The technology was presented in 1979 in Brussels (Belgium), during the Convention held by the Audio Engineering Society.
That year, Philips signed a contract with the British company Polydor Records (a branch of the Deutsche Grammophon company created in 1924). The first results included the first pressing test in 1979, the first commercial operation in 1982 and the pressing of the first popular music work in 1986. Technically speaking, a compact disc is a circular piece of polycarbonate plastic and it weighs around twenty grams. The surface containing the digital musical informations is protected by a film of lacquer (a liquid made of shellac dissolved in alcohol or of synthetic substances). Its speed reaches 1 229 Mbits per second. Compact disc readers were the first music readers to be included in computers or cars.
From 1994, the compact disc began to decline because of the arrival of internet-based distributions in the field of music, with the MP3 file format and content delivery platforms (in 1999). These platforms are characterised by their direct nature. They offer the chance to any composer to be known directly by new audiences worldwide, without being published and distributed if they cannot afford the costs of the services offered by music publishers and retail outlets. For artists who chose to sign a contract with a label, rights management became a more complex reality (it already was). For music lovers who do not especially want to owe music, music listening became totally free over a period of some years. That is totally new in the music industry, as Edison and Berliner had launched the basis of a very successful market.