Before 1877, every piece of music anyone had ever heard was played live, by someone present. Then Thomas Edison recited "Mary Had a Little Lamb" into a machine that scratched his voice's vibrations onto a sheet of tinfoil, and played it back. Within fifty years recording had changed what music is, who earns from it and how far a style can travel.
From cylinder to radio
Edison's phonograph of 1877 was the first machine to record sound and play it back. Emile Berliner's gramophone (1887) used flat discs, which could be stamped out by the thousands, and discs won out over Edison's cylinders. Early recording was acoustic: performers crowded around a horn, and loud instruments recorded better than soft ones. From 1925, electrical recording with microphones captured soft and subtle sounds, making possible the intimate, close singing style called crooning.
The bandleader John Philip Sousa feared the new machines. In a 1906 essay, "The Menace of Mechanical Music," he warned that if people only listened to records they would stop singing and playing themselves, and amateur music in homes would wither. He was partly wrong, since recordings inspired countless players, and partly right: recording turned most people from music makers into music listeners.
Radio broadcasting took off in the 1920s, bringing music into homes for free. It also spread regional styles across whole countries: a rural fiddler or a Harlem bandleader could reach listeners a thousand miles away, and fees for broadcast performances became a new source of income for songwriters. Before records and radio, the music business mostly sold sheet music; New York's Tin Pan Alley churned out songs for home pianos.
New formats, new sounds
After the Second World War, magnetic tape let engineers edit recordings and stack separate parts, leading to multitrack recording. The long playing record (1948) held about twenty minutes a side, and the small 45 rpm single (1949) suited jukeboxes and teenagers. The studio itself became an instrument.
Rock and roll, emerging in the 1950s, joined rhythm and blues, country and gospel. Its roots ran through Black musicians such as Sister Rosetta Tharpe, a gospel singer whose electric guitar in the 1940s anticipated rock, and Chuck Berry. Because radio and charts were segregated, white singers often released cover versions of songs by Black artists; Pat Boone's 1956 cover of Little Richard's "Tutti Frutti" reached white audiences many stations would not let Little Richard reach. Cover versions by white artists often earned more money than the Black originals they copied, an injustice musicians and historians still discuss.
Hip hop and sampling
Hip hop began in the Bronx in the 1970s, among Black and Latino young people in a borough hit hard by poverty and arson. The DJ Kool Herc noticed that dancers loved the breaks, the short drum sections of funk records, so he used two turntables to repeat and extend the break, switching between two copies of a record. MCs rhymed over these beats. Later producers used digital samplers. Sampling means reusing part of an existing recording in a new one, and it raised hard questions about creativity and ownership. In 1991 a US court ruled against an unlicensed sample, and since then samples must usually be cleared and paid for.
Digital music and a global market
The compact disc arrived in 1982. Then compressed digital files made music easy to copy, and in 1999 the file sharing service Napster let millions trade songs for free. Sales collapsed. The industry recovered through streaming, which pays artists a fraction of a cent per play, so income flows mostly to the biggest stars and the owners of large catalogs. Meanwhile, the internet made popular music truly global: Jamaican reggae, Nigerian Afrobeats, Korean pop and Latin music all top charts far from home.
Worked example: six seconds of drums
In 1969 a soul group called the Winstons released "Amen, Brother" as the B side of a single. Midway through, the drummer, Gregory Coleman, played a solo lasting about six seconds. Decades later, hip hop producers, and then makers of jungle and drum and bass, discovered it. Known as the "Amen break," it has been sampled in thousands of tracks, making it among the most reused recordings ever made.
Coleman reportedly died poor in 2006, and the band's leader, Richard Spencer, who held the copyright, said he never received payment for those samples; many uses were never cleared. In 2015 fans raised money online to give Spencer a gift of thanks.
The case shows recording's double edge. A six second performance gained a kind of immortality and helped create whole genres. Yet the system that sells recordings rewarded many of the people who reused it, not the musicians who made it. Asking who gets paid, and who gets credit, is as much a part of music history as asking how a song sounds.