The Recording Industry

Even though music began to be recorded in 1900, records were not openly available to the public until about 1910. Until then, sheet music was wildly popular. Most middle and upper class homes had pianos, so sheet music was a large and prosperous market. Once record sales began to soar in the 1910s, sheet music sales declined. The first musical recording ever was a cornet solo of "Yankee Doodle" performed in 1878 in New York City. Continuing in the domino affect was the rise of popular music being played on the radio around 1922. The radio was a double whammy because popular songs were played so often that people tired of them before they bought the sheet music or the record.

**FUN FACT** 

Madame Oberon, a Wagnerian soprano, had to stand ten feet away from the recording horn because her high notes knocked the recording needle off the master disc. Back when recording on a Gramophone, artists were required to move forward (towards the horn) when singing softly and back away (away from horn) when singing loudly. The engineers were responsible for moving the singers back and forth, which often caused a bitter relationship between the two.



Eldridge Johnson was the most important figure in improving the mechanics of the recording machine. He designed a spring motor to replace the hand-wound apparatus in the Gramophone invented by Emile Berliner. After various other improvements, Johnson salvaged and reorganized Berliner's Gramophone Company to Victor Talking Machine Company. On average, consumers bought 35 records for every phonograph.



Artistically, the 1930s and '40s were tremendous years of the recording industries. The Big Band sounds of Glen Miller and Benny Goodman brought about excellent dance music.** The crooning style of singing brought about Bing Crosby and Rudy Vallee. And in 1932, the first disc jockey program hit the airwaves. Al Jarvis' Make Believe Ballroom is considered to be the first disc jockey show.**


"Race Music" was a generic term for almost any black-oriented popular music until the terms "blues" and "rhythm and blues" became popular. Often, white artists recorded "cleaned-up" versions of popular race records. What is even crazier than this is that their versions usually outsold the originals. In the mid to late 1950s, The Miracles, the Supremes, and the Marvelettes, among others, combined influences from blues, gospel, pop, and jazz to create a sound that appealed to a both black and white audience.**

In 1958, the Record Industry Association of America began to audit and certify record sales. Perry Como received the first certified gold record in 1958 for his single "Catch a Falling Star."** In order to do this, he was required to sell 1 million copies of his single. For platinum certification, which began in 1976, an album had to double its requirements for gold certification. The Eagles' Their Greatest Hits received the first platinum award in 1976. In 2004, the RIAA added a Digital Sales award followed by a Digital Ringtone Award in 2006. Bing Crosby's 1942 recording of "White Christmas" is thoguht to be the best-selling single of all time, capping more than 50 million copies.**And Michael Jackson's Thriller is considered the biggest selling album of all time, with sales over 100 million copies.



Recording can be split into two different types. Monaural means that only one channel was used to record. It is the equivalent to listening with only one ear. Stereo recording uses two channels to record and is the equivalent to listening with two ears. Multitrack recording allows an artist to record one instrument or voice at a time on separate tracks. Paul McCartney, Stevie Wonder, and Prince, among many others, have all done this routinely.


As many people know, in 2001, a large struggle for digital music rights between Napster.com and the music industry. In the end, Napster lost. Pay sites began to spring up and users began to frequent these different pay sites.

Elvis Presley, the King rock 'n' roll, was large and in charge in the early 1950s into the '60s until he died from a heart attack on August 16, 1977. Around his glory days, popular music came under heavy criticism, especially rock 'n' roll, which was said to cause atrophy in the brain, cause delinquency, or incite crime. Ice T's song "Cop Killer" created such an uprrar that his company took it off of the shelves, removed the offensive song, and then placed it back on shelves. As a solution, the Parents' Music Resource Center persuaded the music industry to label albums containing explicit lyrics.