In the age of Spotify and iTunes, when millions of songs are available at your fingertips, no one wants to deal with the inconvenience that comes with physical format and other than snobs and purists, the majority of people don’t care a fig if the experience of listening to music should be tactile, immersive or nostalgic.
Earlier this month, however, a small number of people celebrated International Cassette Store Day, an annual celebration of a music format once thought headed for extinction but now enjoying a rebirth.
As collectors and music fans wearing the t-shirts of obscure rock bands brave the tropical heat outside a record store near Malaysia's capital, waiting to get their hands on new cassette tapes, here's a re-look at how we got from phonographs to where we stand today.
In the 1890s, the transition to using flat-disc records began. The recording was etched onto a disc that would be recognizable even today as a record. Discs were first released in a five-inch version, then in a seven-inch, a ten-inch, and finally a 12-inch version in 1903.
Our story begins, as many do, with Thomas Edison. Before his invention of the phonograph in 1877, music listeners could only listen to their favorite songs when someone else was playing them, whether in a concert hall or at home. Then came the first machine that could both record music and play it back. Sounds to be recorded were transmitted through a recording stylus, which would create indentations on a round phonograph cylinder, and a playback stylus could read the recording and play it back through a diaphragm and the iconic horn.
The transition to vinyl also coincided with the change of the industry standard from 78 rpm to 33 1/3 rpm, which allowed a much larger amount of music to be recorded on a single disc.
Extended-play (EP) 45s were also introduced, each of which could contain two songs on each side.
Although radio technology had been around since the early 20th century, it wasn’t until later that music started to hit the airwaves. The early history of music radio is murky, but a college radio station in the San Jose area is purported to have broadcast music between 1912 and 1917, though it didn’t start broadcasting daily until later.
During World War I (as well as World War II), the US Congress suspended all amateur radio broadcasts, meaning that many stations went off the air permanently. But 1XE of Medford, Massachusetts, was broadcasting music in 1919, shortly after the end of the war, and in the following years, more music radio stations began to pop up.
By the late 60s, all of Ford’s cars were offered with an available 8-track player as an upgrade, and hundreds of tapes were released, with the catalogue soon rivaling that of vinyl.
In 1958, RCA would change the future of home music consumption by introducing the RCA tape cartridge. Before this cartridge, magnetic tape wasn’t a realistic option for home use, as reel-to-reel players were too complicated for consumers, especially compared to record players, which had been the de facto standard for home listening for several decades.
An innovation possibly even more important than the cassette itself, however, was released by Sony in 1979: . No longer tied to large home record players or large, inconvenient portable tape decks, listeners could easily take their music with them wherever they went. And because the first Walkman included two headphone jacks, music could be enjoyed with a friend.
Although digital recording had been happening since the late 1960s, it wasn’t until the early 1980s that the first commercial compact discs (CDs) appeared. In 1981, ABBA’s The Visitors became the first popular music album to be pressed to CD, which was quickly followed by the first album to be released on CD, Billy Joel’s 52nd Street. Since then, musical releases have almost always included a CD release, with the format dominating the market in the late 80s, through the 90s, and into the early 2000s.
MP3s
The history of MP3 is a fascinating one. It began in 1982, when Karlheinz Brandenburg was an electrical engineering PhD student at Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg. His thesis advisor issued him a challenge: find a way to transmit music over digital phone lines.
1986 saw the first real progress on the project, when more advanced technology was used to separate sounds into three sections, or “layers,” each of which could be saved or discarded depending on its importance to the overall sound. Brandenburg and his colleagues took advantage of a bit of a psychoacoustic phenomenon called auditory masking to compress the file size of the recording. After realizing that this new format could be of great use to the growing Internet, Brandenburg and MPEG decided on a file extension in 1995: .
Though the title of “first music streaming service” isn’t easy to bestow, Pandora easily takes the “biggest early music streaming service” label. Launched in 2005, it pioneered the style of music recommendation service that would grow to become one of the biggest trends in modern music.
Within the past few years, online streaming has surpassed digital music sales, adding to the worries that allowing listeners to access music for free (or very nearly free; a premium subscription to Spotify is only $10 per month) will destroy the music industry, as the unnamed English entrepreneur predicted to Brandenburg when he showed off the MP3. Whatever the reason, album sales are tanking, with totals hitting record low numbers, and online streaming is taking off.
