Commercial music has widely become a daily pleasure across the western world. Tracing back the history and timeline of the gramophone record, or vinyl record as most commonly known in the UK, is somewhat fascinating to see a huge change in the record industry over especially the last 30 years.
In 1857 Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville created what was known as the phonoautograph, it simply played variations of sound in discs of paper by a simple vibration from a pen in the device, the sound could not be played back. In 1877, Thomas Edison built created the phonograph which unlike the design it had the ability to record and reproduce the sound, however there is no official evidence that suggests Edison built on Martinville’s idea. Edison experimented with several ways of creating the ‘records’ that played the music; starting with a wax coated paper tape. By the end of 1877 the device used foil cylinders; it dominated the recorded sound market in the beginning of the 1880s. In 1888, Emile Berliner created lateral-cut disc records, which were improved later by Eldridge R. Johnson which produced sound as good as the earlier cylinders. Edison then introduced the amberol cylinder in 1909, which generated the expiration of them lateral-cut discs which opened a market for a huge launch in the production of disc records which dominated the market from 1929. Various sizes, materials and speeds were experimented with; there was a boom in record sales after WWII. By the 1960s record players were affordable to the average household, the players improved gradually over the years. However, by the turn of the early 1990s it was not uncommon for households to have CD players and eventually there was less of a demand for vinyl records and CDs took over. Although in 2008 vinyl record sales hit a huge 36% increase in sales.
It wasn’t so much the records themselves that had such a huge influence on society but the record cover artwork, it impacted on social values, lifestyles and fashion. In 1939, Alex Steinweiss was hired by Columbia Records as an art director to produce the artwork which soon increased the sales. Since then many artists have worked with record labels to produce many ‘historic works of art’. Andy Warhol created the famous iconic rolling stones logo of Jagger’s mouth with a zip in the tongue. Originally the album cover actually had a real zip but damaged the other records when they were stacked and shipped.
Nowadays vinyl records are seen as historical documents for preserving audio versions of events in time. Many of them are seen as rare and collectable, John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s signed record of Double Fantasy is considered the rarest of them all valued at $525,000.
To Quote Henry Jenkins; ‘I will argue here against the idea that convergence should be understood primarily as a technological process bringing together multiple media functions within the same devices. Instead, convergence represents a cultural shift as consumers are encouraged to seek out new information and make connections among dispersed media content.’ It is clear that the change in the way music has been changed and distributed over the years has for I become evident that it is due to the constant demand of change by consumers that companies have to keep up with.
Conversely, despite being such a huge ‘artefact’ as such in history and being taken over by the CD in record sales; it is more popular to download music and audio files in the current 21st century. Illegal downloads of music are said to be ‘killing the music industry’. I think maybe in the future records will only be sold as collectables which will increase prices and the demand for records again.
References
Jenkins, H., Convergence culture: where old and new media collide. 2006. New york University Press. Pp.3
