An International History of the Recording Industry

A comprehensive reference guide to the history of recording, this book combines the technical history of the recording process and the industry that grew up to support it, with the history of the musical, vocal and spoken repertoire that developed in parallel with recording. Starting with the simultaneous inventions of Charles Cros and Thomas Edison, the book charts the story of the phonograph from the earliest recordings by figures such as Brahms and Tennyson to the development of the modern gramophone. The complex patent and copyright history of early inventions is set out, as is the commercial climate in which the first record companies emerged. The late-19th-century musical legacy and its performance practice implications are discussed, leading to the pioneering work of, for example, Henry Wood and Thomas Beecham. Popular music history is also examined, on an international basis, with Argentine and Uruguayan tango records discussed alongside American ragtime and jazz and European operetta. The book also analyzes the recording boom before the Depression, the pre-war reconstruction of the industry, the emergence of recording entrepreneurs, disc jockeys and crooners, the emergence of rebetika in Europe, the Caribbean record industry, and the first libraries. In the post-war period, the book covers the breathtaking speed of technical development from EP to LP to cassette to CD, and the enormous explosion of popular music. The final chapters examine new technical innovations such as DAT and minidisc, and record-derived music techniques such as scratch, karaoke, dup and rap.