Annual production of pianos and player pianos in the United States peaked in 1899 at 365,000 and averaged 300,000 per year in the first two decades of the twentieth century.4
The first device to record sound was a phonautograph, patented in France in 1857 by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, which traced sound waves onto a sheet of paper blackened by soot (see figure 3). The traces were meant only to be seen and analyzed, as there was no means to play them back.5 In 1877 Thomas Edison first demonstrated his phonograph, which recorded sound onto a rotating cylinder wrapped in tin foil, which could play back the sound. He received a patent the following year, and his investors formed the Edison Speaking Phonograph Company in 1878. The tin-foil recordings were not very durable, and the sound quality was poor, and so Edison moved on to the incandescent bulb. In 1887 Charles Tainter and Chichester Bell (Alexander’s cousin) demonstrated their graphophone (reversing phon-o-graph), which used more durable wax-coated cylinders, and the American Graphophone Company was formed. Edison responded and released his new gramophone later that year, and the Edison Phonograph Company was formed. Businessman Jesse Lippincott purchased interests in Edison’s two phonograph companies and American Graphophone and formed the North American Phonograph Company to corner the market. Lippincott leased rights to sell the machines, and the Delaware, Maryland, and DC franchise would eventually become the first of the major record labels that we know today: Columbia Phonograph Company.
In 1889 recorded cylinders were used in coin-operated phonographs (activated for a nickel), the precursors to jukeboxes. By 1892 a downsized U.S. Marine Band had recorded over a hundred selections for Columbia, sold for two dollars a cylinder (prices would drop over the decade). The cylinder shape prohibited them from being mass produced, and so artists typically recorded in front of five to ten machines, each recording one cylinder. Additional machines could be connected to each of the master machines, and so a single two-minute recording session could yield up to fifty copies. Artists would have to perform the piece over and over again to produce more copies.
Emile Berliner’s gramophone (patented in 1887) used a flat disc, which solved the problem of mass production. The wax master disc recording was electroplated and could then stamp out rubber (and later shellac) copies. In 1894 Berliner opened a factory in Baltimore and sold a thousand machines and twenty-five thousand records. With the help of inventor Eldridge Reeve Johnson, who developed an improved stable motor, the gramophone successfully competed with Edison’s phonograph, and in 1901 Berliner and Johnson formed the Victor Talking Machine Company, the second of the major record labels that is still around (later RCA Victor, now RCA). In the first decade of the twentieth century, three major record companies dominated: Edison (cylinders), Victor (discs), and Columbia (cylinders and discs). Annual production of recordings increased tenfold: from 2.75 million in 1899 to 27.5 million in 1909. Cylinders outsold discs at the beginning of the decade by two to one; by 1914 discs outsold cylinders by nine to one.6
In 1902 Victor made a portable recording machine, allowing them to record music around the world. That year Enrico Caruso, star of Milan’s opera house La Scala, made his debut recordings, the popularity of which prompted his move in 1903 to join the Metropolitan Opera Company in New York. Contracted to record exclusively with Victor from 1904 to 1920, he was initially paid $4,000 for the first ten sides and a royalty of forty cents for every disc sold. Caruso made over 250 recordings with Victor, earning several million dollars from them, making him one of the first international stars of the early recording industry. In 1903 the first royalty payments for performers were negotiated in a contract with Italian tenor Francesco Tamagno, at 20 percent of the retail price of each disc sold.
Until 1908 discs were recorded on just one side. Annual retail record sales peaked at $106.5 million in 1921. Retail record sales then dropped dramatically (in part because of the rise of commercial radio broadcasting in 1922); they began to recover after the advent of electrical recording (1926–29) and then sank to a low during the Depression of $6 million in 1933. Sales would not recover to its 1921 high until 1947 (Sanjek 1996: 62, 117, 120).
In the 1920s record companies discovered latent markets, including southern whites and African Americans, labeling the categories hillbilly (or folk) and race. The hillbilly market was later renamed country and western (or just country). The race category, which included spirituals, gospel, blues, and sermons, underwent many name changes: rhythm and blues (late 1940s), soul (1960s), black music (1960s–70s), and finally R&B. At first, race records were not impacted by declining sales in the 1920s: new releases went from about fifty (1922) to a high of five hundred (1929), at which point the bottom dropped out as the Depression kicked in (Dixon and Godrich 1970: 104–5). The new hillbilly category of records initially survived, on the back of Jimmie Rodgers, who was signed to Victor in 1927 and was tallying 350,000 copies sold for new releases between 1928 and 1930, but they eventually succumbed too.
The age of electrical recording began in 1925, using a microphone, vacuum tube amplifier, and electromagnetic recording and playback head and stylus. The recording studio then split into two distinct spaces: the studio itself, where the sounds of the musicians were picked up on microphones; and the control room, where the engineers ran the recording equipment that etched the electrical signals onto a master disc (later magnetic tape).7 Victor’s Orthophonic Victrola (1925) was the first commercial phonograph to take advantage of the expanded fidelity. The difference between acoustic and electrical recording can be heard by comparing Bessie Smith’s approximately seventy acoustic recordings made for Columbia between 1923 and January 1925 (e.g., “St. Louis Blues,” recorded January 1925) with her first electrical recordings, which began in May 1925: “Cake Walking Babies” and “The Yellow Dog Blues” (B. Smith 1991-d).8
In 1929 Radio Corporation of America (RCA) purchased Victor, and Edison stopped manufacturing phonographs and recordings. Coin-operated jukeboxes expanded in the 1930s, reaching 150,000 by 1936, accounting for 40 percent of record sales. After World War II retail record sales surpassed the 1921 high, reaching $224 million in 1947. Independent record labels began expanding, breaking even with a record selling 10,000 copies, helped along with jukeboxes. Hit records in the R&B market in the early 1950s typically sold more than 150,000 copies. The new vinyl record technology gave a boost to sales in the early 1950s, and then sales exploded with the advent of rock and roll: from $277 million (1955) to $600 million (1960). The industry hit its high in retail sales of recordings in 1999 at $14.58 billion and then drastically declined because of internet file sharing to $8.48 billion by 2008.9
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) was formed in 1951 to look after the interests of the record manufacturers. At the time about eight hundred record labels were officially registered, with fewer than forty-five of them doing annual business of more than $20,000. In 1958 the RIAA began certifying gold records (one million singles sold or one million dollars in wholesale album sales); in 1975 half a million albums sold earned a gold record and in 1976 platinum was introduced at one million for albums. In 1989 the new gold benchmark for singles was lowered to half a million copies sold (A. White 1990: viii, 3–4).
Recording-artist guarantees hit a turning point in 1967, after the Beatles renegotiated their contract with EMI. Some San Francisco bands, coming off of Monterey Pop Festival, got $250,000 to sign with a record label. A new high was set by Elton John when he renewed his contract with MCA in the 1970s, guaranteeing him over $8 million for six albums over a five-year period, including a $1.40 royalty on albums (selling for $6.98). The industry was expanding, reaching $2.2 billion in retail sales in 1974. After receiving nine Grammy Awards and his six most recent albums selling over five hundred thousand copies each, Stevie Wonder received a seven-year contract from Motown worth $14 million, the highest up to that point, beginning with Songs in the Key of Life in 1976 (Sanjek 1996: 536–39).
The three earliest record companies, Edison, Columbia, and Victor, set the model for major labels, so-called because of their economic power and national distribution networks. Since the 1930s there have typically been four to six major record labels at any one point. Many smaller local independent record labels filled the voids, sometimes acting as
