Spinning Discs: Recorded Music

Abstract

Before the later part of the nineteenth century, if you wanted music you either had to play it yourself or find someone else to do it for you. Generations of young ladies were encouraged to learn the piano as an ‘accomplishment’, but really to provide their families with a source of entertainment. Music only existed ‘live’. The exceptions were the chiming of clocks, and barrel organs which could only play one tune, or at best a few short ones.

My idea is that there is music in the air, and music all around us; the world is full of it, and you simply take as much as you require.

Edward Elgar

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Before the later part of the nineteenth century, if you wanted music you either had to play it yourself or find someone else to do it for you. Generations of young ladies were encouraged to learn the piano as an ‘accomplishment’, but really to provide their families with a source of entertainment. Music only existed ‘live’. The exceptions were the chiming of clocks, and barrel organs which could only play one tune, or at best a few short ones.

The breakthrough was the use of rolls of stiff paper similar to a Jacquard loom which could easily be changed. This is usually ascribed to the Black Forest firm of Michael Welte und Soehne in 1887, and it also gave the great advantage that the rolls could be duplicated much more easily than barrels with their complicated sets of pins. ¹ Before long, the same idea was transferred to the piano to produce what was commonly known as the pianola.

At first, the mechanical system could only operate the notes and any ‘performance’ involving dynamics and phrasing had to be supplied by the operator via a series of controls. Later, even this was overcome and the rolls could reproduce the playing of a real pianist. Some rolls were recorded by famous musicians such as Paderewski, and huge music libraries were built up in the early years of the twentieth century, when pianolas were quite popular.

After the First World War they went into decline, and by the 1930s had almost disappeared. Their demise coincided with the rise of radio and with another instrument which was able to reproduce music—the gramophone. This had the advantage that not only the player but also the ‘record’ was much easier, and hence cheaper, to produce. To find its origins it is necessary to go back to 1877.

Thomas Edison had been beaten to the telephone by Alexander Graham Bell, but he realized that the crux of the device, the vibrating diaphragm, could have other uses. He used it to move a stylus which indented a groove on a layer of tinfoil wrapped around a cylindrical drum. This was turned by a handle, which both rotated the drum and moved it laterally by returning the stylus to the start of the groove and winding the handle again. The stylus would follow the groove, and vibrate the diaphragm in sympathy. ² The result was a recording of the nursery rhyme ‘Mary had a little lamb’ although it was a very feeble and distorted version of the original.

Edison paused long enough to name the device the ‘Phonograph’ before losing interest as he was trying to make a telephone repeater and it didn’t work well in this role. It took a few years before Bell and Charles Tainter substituted a wax cylinder for the tinfoil coated drum and this led Edison to return to it and improve it further. Though the cylinders didn’t last long, the machines found a use for recording dictation and providing some 2–4 min of low-quality music reproduction.

The great drawback of the cylinder was that it could not be reproduced—each one had to be recorded separately (or possibly a couple recorded at the same time). However, one man thought that there had to be a better method. He was Emile Berliner, an American who had already made his name in the development of the resistance microphone which had turned the telephone into a practical device (Fig. 7.1).

Fig. 7.1

Emile Berliner. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emile_Berliner#/media/File:Emile_Berliner.jpg

Berliner was originally from Hanover, but had gone to America in 1870 to avoid being drafted into the Franco-Prussian war. ³ His drive and inventiveness took him from doing odd jobs to being a researcher for the American Bell Company. Having become financially secure from the proceeds of his various patents he decided to leave and set up as an independent inventor.

His particular interest was in being able to record and replay speech and music. He looked at the devices made by Edison and Bell and Tainter, and felt they were not the solution. He also needed to make something quite different in order not to infringe their patents. The first part of his solution was to make the recording on a flat disk instead of a cylinder. A disk is much easier to handle and store than a cylinder—it takes up less space—but crucially it opens up the possibility of making multiple copies. This was the real advantage.

The other half of his approach was to cut the groove which recorded the sound from side to side instead of the hill and dale of previous inventors. This wasn’t just to be different. He argued that the stylus would find it more difficult to cut the deeper grooves and hence not reproduce the sound correctly. This was overcome in his side-to-side movement. Another advantage was that the constant depth of the channel could be used to guide the stylus so it no longer needed to be moved by a mechanical screw on the player. In the previous designs, a period of low indentation would cause it to lose the track. This meant a simpler player. ⁴

Berliner began to experiment with different types of disks. For the master, he settled on a zinc disk with a wax coating. This could then be put into an acid bath for a controlled time and the zinc partially etched away hence making a substantial master. He then plated this to produce a negative version which could be used to produce ‘stampers’ to press copies of the original.

The material for the final disks caused him a considerable amount of trouble. He tried plaster of Paris and sealing wax before turning to the new substance, celluloid. None of these were really satisfactory. The next attempt was to use a hard rubber, which was reasonably satisfactory, before he finally came up with shellac. This, though breakable, produced a durable and practicable record which could be played many times.

Berliner protected his ideas for what he called the ‘Gramophone’ by taking out patents in the US, Britain, Germany and Canada. ⁵ As he came up with further improvements he also protected these. The next step was to try to set up companies to exploit the ideas. However, while demonstrating his ideas in Germany he was approached by a toy manufacturer, Kammerer and Reinhardt, to make his machines. So the first records and players were produced in his native Germany as toys. These used 5-in. records and a tiny player.

In America he set up a Gramophone company in partnership with Eldridge Johnson who contributed a clever spring-wound motor, hence producing a playback machine that ran at a constant speed. Outside the US, he founded the Gramophone Company in England, Deutsch Gramophon in Germany, and also the Gram-o-phone Company in Canada.

In America he made an agreement with an experienced salesman, Frank Seaman, to distribute his machines and records. At first this seemed to go well, but Seaman had his own agenda and wanted to control the business himself. While still selling Berliner machines he set up the Zonophone Company to distribute and sell his own machines and records. ⁶

Berliner reacted, not unnaturally, by refusing to supply Seaman any further. However, Seaman managed to get an injunction to prevent Berliner operating. He was also able to dispute the validity of the Berliner patents and gained a judgment in another of those disputed patent cases that seemed to happen around the late nineteenth century.

In disgust, Berliner went to Canada where he could still operate, assigning his US patents to Johnson and leaving him to continue the fight. Eventually Johnson triumphed, and set up the Victor Talking Machine Company with Berliner still in the background. Though there was some competition they now had a successful business as their shellac records rotating at 78 rpm became the de facto standard. The sales really began to grow. ⁷

By the early twentieth century the Columbia Record Company, which was a merger of the cylinder phonograph interests, was giving up the fight and starting to produce disks. In 1908, they introduced double-sided disks which up to then had only been recorded on one side. In America, and the other countries where these companies operated, the sales of records and players increased dramatically once records of reasonable quality and low-cost players were available. By 1913, it was estimated that a third of British homes had a gramophone. ⁸

It was Britain that was the source of the famous ‘His Masters Voice’ logo. Francis Barraud had painted a picture of his old dog looking into the horn of a cylinder phonograph. When the manager of the Gramophone Company saw the picture he asked if it could be changed to show one of their disc machines instead. Barraud modified the picture and sold it to them together with the slogan ‘His Masters Voice’. The Berliner -associated companies made very good use of this as a trademark, which was shortened to HMV but accompanied by the picture of the dog and a gramophone. ⁹

Even though the records only lasted for some 4 min, the ability to reproduce the work of real singers and musicians made them very popular. The companies persuaded famous singers such as Caruso and Dame Nellie Melba to record for them. By 1914, the Gramophone Company was selling approaching four million records a year and it had collected many competitors such as Columbia Records. ¹⁰

All this was achieved without any electronics to amplify the signals. Recording took place in a small studio with the musicians huddled around the mouth of a giant horn (Fig. 7.2). This usually projected from a curtain, which was there partly to deaden any sound from the recording apparatus, though this was unlikely to be a problem with the insensitivity of the system. More importantly, it was there to hide the important recording equipment which the companies wanted to keep secret.

Fig. 7.2

The composer Edward Elgar recording with an orchestra. The horn can be seen projecting on the right. The tape wound around it is to dampen resonances. Source: http://www.charm.rhul.ac.uk/history/p20_4_1.html

On the narrow end of the horn was a diaphragm that vibrated with the sound, moving a stylus which cut a groove in a wax master record which was slowly inched sideways as the recording progressed. Thus it was the opposite way round to the playback where the stylus and horn moved as it worked across the record. The recording horns were simply too big and heavy to do anything else.

The wax recording was then plated to produce a copper master which was a negative. From this was made a ‘mother’ which was a positive and hence a durable copy of the original vulnerable wax master. The mother was then used to make negative ‘stampers’, used to press the actual shellac records. It seemed a complicated process, but it only had to be done once and then large numbers of saleable copies could be made of popular songs such as ‘Ma he’s making eyes at me’, ‘Yes we have no bananas’, ‘Tea for two’, ‘Blue moon’, and many more.

When J.P. Maxfield and H.C. Harrison at Bell Labs , using their experience with telephone and public address systems, produced an electronic means of recording in 1925 the poor quality of mechanical recording became very evident. The electronic system was licenced out by Western Electric for other record companies to use. ¹¹ The changeover was rapid.

In Britain, the Columbia Record Company—now British controlled and also owning the American Columbia—was searching for a way to avoid paying the royalties on the Western Electric system. In 1929, they employed a bright young electronics engineer, Alan Blumlein . He and his team were tasked with finding a method of recording that avoided the patents. ¹²

They produced a moving coil cutter with electronic adjustment to control its characteristics, which performed even better than the Western Electric system’s moving iron head with its mechanical filtering. Now really good recordings could be made. At the same time, electronics could be applied to the players to give better reproduction and, particularly useful in halls, greater loudness.

The coming of electronics turned out to be a mixed blessing. While it enabled better recording systems, it also brought two serious competitors: talking films and radio. These soon started to have a drastic effect on the fortunes of the record industry, particularly in 1930 when a slump set in. Sales and profits fell sharply which soon led to a merger between Columbia and the Gramophone Company with the new company called Electrical and Musical Industries (EMI ). The search for other business areas led them into television which was where Alan Blumlein was to have yet another impact (see Chap. 4).

Blumlein was to make yet another contribution to recording. The story goes that he and his wife were at a cinema and were disconcerted by the sound coming from a single set of speakers which could be a long way from the actor on the other side of the screen. He claimed to have the answer. In 1931 he invented ‘binaural sound’, later known as stereo. ¹³ The system uses two channels which are recorded separately (in the two sides of the same record groove) and manipulated in such a way that, if the listener is in the correct place between the two loudspeakers, the sound appears to come from a particular position. Hence, when applied to a cinema film the sound followed the actor across the screen. The system only started to appear on records in the late 1950s. (Blumlein was to go on to work on the development of the H2S airborne radar during the Second World War. Unfortunately, he was in a Halifax bomber trialling the system in 1942 when it crashed in Wales, killing all the crew. He was only 38.)

One device that helped save the record industry was the automatic player, which was introduced in the 1930s, and after 1940 was known as the juke box . ¹⁴ This could play a record from a large number stored inside. A customer inserted his money in the slot and then choose a song or other piece of music. The machine would then pick the record from its store, place it on a turntable, lower the stylus and start to play it, all automatically. They were popular in bars, cafés and restaurants and absorbed a considerable proportion of the industry’s output in the 1940s and 1950s.

Throughout the 1930s the search was on for a type of record that could play for much longer than the 78. What was required was a much finer groove so that they could be packed much closer together and hence give a greatly extended track length. Also if the rotational speed was reduced the time would be increased. Two innovations made this possible. The first was a superior material for the disc, Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC), commonly known as ‘vinyl’. The second was the use of synthetic gems, usually sapphire, for the stylus which could then be formed to a much finer point.

In 1948, Columbia introduced a long playing record (LP) using the new vinyl rotating at 33 rpm (actually $33{\scriptscriptstyle \raisebox{1ex}{$1$}\!\left/ \!\raisebox{-1ex}{$3$}\right.} rpm$ but commonly known as 33). This used a smaller groove one-third of the size of those on the existing 78s, so on a 12-in. disk each side lasted for 25 min. In addition, the new material lowered the surface noise and produced a sound with less hiss. ¹⁵

The following year RCA Victor—RCA had bought out the Victor Company—introduced a rival. It used a similar microgroove and rotated at 45 rpm. It was much smaller in size at 7-in. diameter but still played for the 4–5 min of the 12-in. 78. ¹⁶ Far from being competition for each other the two formats both blossomed, with the LP being used for albums and classical recordings while the 45s carried the popular ‘singles’.

In the UK, these formats only appeared in 1952, but the availability of multispeed record players soon made them popular. By the end of the decade they had virtually replaced 78s. While the fortunes of the record industry had been improving since the war, it was the arrival of these formats and the pop music boom that drove sales. This was entangled with the youth culture of that period which is examined further in Chap. 9 (Fig. 7.3).

Fig. 7.3

Sales of recorded music in the UK, 1930–2000. Source: Author ²⁰

Waiting in the wings was another recording technology. Its genesis lay back in 1898 when Valdemar Poulsen , of arc transmitter fame, invented his Telegraphone. ¹⁷ His idea was that in a telephone system where the receiver is an electromagnet and a diaphragm, if the diaphragm was replaced by a moving steel wire it would become magnetized with a copy of the telephone speech. By running the wire back under another electromagnet connected to a telephone receiver the recorded signal could be played back. ¹⁸

The system worked, but he and his associates never managed to build a satisfactory telephone answering machine, which was what they were attempting. Later the focus changed to a dictation machine, but though this was more satisfactory it was never able to compete with the phonograph cylinder devices. What had seemed like a good idea fizzled out. It needed to wait, once again, for the electronics to catch up.

In the early 1930s, the German company AEG made a serious attempt to develop a magnetic recorder. ¹⁹ The objective was to use a new plastic-based tape with a magnetic iron oxide coating developed by the chemical company I.G. Farben. This resulted in a device they called the Magnetophone which was a high-quality recorder for use in radio broadcasting stations. The German broadcasting authority, Reichs Rundfunk Gesellschaft, became a major user and installed Magnetophones in nearly all its studios so that programs could be recorded and then replayed at a convenient time.

During the Second World War this technology was used in virtually all the stations controlled by the Germans in the occupied countries. The result was that magnetic recording became fairly standard in European radio stations. In America, with its bias towards live programing, there was little interest in the devices.

At the end of the war the victorious Allies were on the look out for any useful technology and soon discovered the Magnetophones. The technical details were studied and examples of the machines were sent to England, France and the US. These soon formed the basis of a renewed interest in tape recording for use in broadcasting, and the development of industries in those countries.

As the quality of these machines was higher than gramophone records, tape was soon being used to make the original recordings as it could easily be edited so small mistakes could be removed. The masters for making the records were derived from this edited master tape. The tape itself was soon available from a number of suppliers such as 3M who had taken all the information about the German tapes and produced their own versions.

As the 1950s progressed, the prices of tape recorders began to fall, and the quantities sold to rise. Though some manufacturers tried to turn them into a mass-market item the basic drawback was the tape-reel system. To play a tape the spool had to be loaded on to one spindle and an empty spool on to the other. The tape had to be threaded through the heads and started into the slot on the take-up spool winding it on until it held. The whole process was rather fiddly. In addition, the tape would have to be wound back before it could be removed from the machine.

Manufacturers started to look for a more convenient format. RCA tried a cassette where the feed and take-up spools were all enclosed and it could he dropped into the machine. While they produced the cassette they were too late with the players and the whole project fizzled out.

In Hasselt in Belgium, in a subsidiary of the Dutch Philips company, the director Lou Ottens and his team were working on a compact cassette. ²¹ They knew that others were trying to produce their own formats and that this was not a matter of who had the best technical solution but who established the standard in the marketplace. To achieve this they did a deal with the Japanese manufacturer Sony, and were also prepared to give other manufacturers a free licence. The result was that after its launch in 1963 it rapidly became the standard.

Though progress was made with reducing the noise or hiss from the tape it was still noticeable. One man, Ray Dolby , came up with a practical solution to this. He was an American who had come to study for a PhD at the University of Cambridge . In 1965 he set up his own company, Dolby Laboratories, in London and worked on this problem. His first system Dolby A was for professional tape systems, but in 1967 he produced Dolby B which was a simplified system for commercial tapes. ²²

The Dolby B system boosted the higher frequencies when recording, but progressively more as the signal decreased. On playback this process was reversed, thus giving an unaffected reproduction. The clever part was that it boosted the signal up away from the tape noise, thus producing an output with considerably reduced noise. When applied to the cassettes it made a marked improvement in performance. Within a few years most prerecorded tapes were using the system and it was being built into playback devices.

The advantage of the tape over records was that the user could record their own music, speech or whatever sounds they liked. One of the main uses was to record programs from the radio or make copies of other tapes or records. This was initially a considerable worry to the record industry but was never really a very serious problem. Tapes were also useful for recording speech such as a talk or a conversation and this led to them being employed in telephone answering machines. A short one was used for the outgoing message and a longer one to receive incoming ones.

By the late 1970s, the manufacture of consumer electronics such as tape machines had largely been taken over by Japanese companies with Sony in the fore. It was in that company that a revolutionary product evolved. The concept was to do away with the recording function and make a small portable cassette player that used headphones. Crucially, the device had to be small and light enough to be carried about by the user. It was launched in the summer of 1979. ²³

Despite a slightly shaky start, the ‘Walkman’ was enthusiastically taken up by young people, justifying the faith of the Sony chairman Akio Morita. No longer was music only available from a fixed record player or tape player, but it could be taken around with the listener. It became a personal player rather than a collective one, thus changing the nature of the market for recorded music.

It was not long before the other manufacturers caught up and the market for personal players was born. With the advent of miniature headphones that were pressed into the ear the players soon shrank to the point where they were little bigger than the cassette. A measure of the success of the approach was that in 1989, after 10 years in production, Sony had produced more than 50 million Walkmans. By 1992 this had reached 100 million and 150 million in 1995. In the late 1980s and early 1990s tapes outsold all other forms of recorded music, but there was another competitor on the horizon.

Interestingly, it came from the same source. At Philips , Lou Ottens was well aware that it is better to make your own product obsolete rather than wait for someone else to do it. He was thus interested in a more satisfactory replacement for the vinyl LP. He took a look at the work Philips had been doing on video discs where the information was recorded on a metalized plastic disk and read with a laser . This had the advantage that there was no surface contact with the disk and it would last much longer. ²⁴

During the development it was realized that there were considerable advantages if the signal was recorded digitally. The sound was broken up into very short sections and each analogue level was converted into a digital number. This stream of digital information could be stored on the disk. At the playback the ones and zeros recorded on the disc could be read by the laser and converted back into a varying analogue signal which would be an accurate image of the original.

By 1979, Philips were able to demonstrate this system, but they were well aware that in order to launch a system so different from the conventional records they needed partners and try to establish an international standard. The obvious company to turn to was Sony , who were already experimenting with digital recording, and with whom they had collaborated on the tape cassette. By later that year the two companies had set up a joint development team to establish the standard for the new disk and system.

Within a year they had agreed on a disk 12 cm in diameter instead of the 12 in. of an LP. This would hold 75 min of music, importantly, as Ohga of Sony insisted, large enough to hold all of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The other more technical aspects of the specification were also settled and they agreed that digital error correction would be needed to overcome the slight flaws in the disk and produce a near perfect sound.

The production of a marketable product was another matter. The concept was pushing the technology in a number of areas such as semiconductor lasers, micro lenses, and the electronics which was only practicable in large-scale integrated circuits. This was in addition to the problems of the disks themselves. Also they had to convince the record companies to adopt the new standard. Here they had an advantage as Philips owned Polygram and Sony were joint owners of CBS/Sony. Even so, it took considerable persuasion to get them to move away from the LP format which had stood them so well for so long.

By the end of 1982, the two companies, and their associated record companies, were able to launch the system. Sony and Philips each produced players and the first few titles were also available on the new shiny Compact Digital Audio Discs. Despite initial criticism, the system began to be accepted. The high quality of the reproduction and the small convenient size of the discs soon convinced all the competitors to adopt this standard.

Sony were obviously going to try to produce a small portable player equivalent to their Walkman. In 1984, they achieved this and, like the original Walkman, it caused the market to take off. Sony had gambled by introducing the product at a low price and it took 18 months before the volume had driven costs down sufficiently for it to become profitable. ²⁵

The success of the format was such that in the early 1990s the sales passed that of tape and LPs and continued to rise. It was the most successful format of all for holding music in a physical form. The take-up of players was very rapid; in Britain some 20% of households had at least one CD player in 1990 rising to 77% a decade later. ²⁶ This was a remarkable change seeing that many (probably most) people already had a good deal of the music on LP or tape. The superiority of the format meant that the users were prepared to rapidly renew their collections.

Of course, turning music into a digital format opened up other possibilities with the advent of computers. As used on CDs, the problem was that it generated very large amounts of data. What was needed was some means of reducing that. In Germany, professor Dieter Seitzer of the University of Erlangen was interested in the possibility of sending high-quality music down telephone lines. To do this, the digital signal would have to be very severely compressed without degrading the reproduction.

It was one of his students, Karlheinz Brandenburg , who took up the baton and worked towards a practical system. In 1989, he and his collaborators took out a patent in Germany. ²⁷ The International Standards Organization also set up a subgroup to produce standards for compression of video and audio signals. It was called the Motion Picture Expert Group and the standard for audio they produced was heavily based on Brandenburg ’s work. They called the new standard MPEG (from the name of the group) audio layer III, better known as MP3. ²⁸

Though the development of the standard took some years, it was finally launched with the MP3 name in 1995. ²⁹ Gradually interest increased and files that could be run on personal computers began to appear. They were very efficient as they were 12 times smaller for the same music when compared with a CD. It was, however, the appearance of small players with memories sufficient to save large numbers of records that changed the game once again. The music tracks could be downloaded from the internet or transferred from a CD.

Though these devices were beginning to have an impact before the end of the century, as can be seen by the reduction in CD sales, it was after the millennium with the advent of Apple’s iPod that they really took off. ³⁰ Music had thus lost touch altogether with the physical format that was used to bring it to the listener. It was just an ethereal collection of ones and zeros that could be transported weightlessly to provide entertainment whenever it was required.

Elgar’s idea that there was music all around has come to pass, though not in the way he was meaning. The world is now full of it—too full, some would say—and people can have as much of it as they require. A whole series of inventions and a pile of technology has transformed the situation from where music only existed when played live to one where each person can listen to it when and where it is desired.

Notes

• 1. The Pianola Institute, History of the Pianola—Orchestrions, available at: http://pianola.org/history/history_orchestrions.cfm.

• 2. Beardsley, R. and Leech-Wilkinson, D. (2009) A brief history of recording. Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music, available at: http://www.charm.kcl.ac.uk/history/p20_4_1.

• 3. The Library of Congress, Special presentation: Emile Berliner , available at: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/berlhtml/berlemil.html.

• 4. Harvey, W.F. (1912) Dr. Berliner : Master inventor. The World’s Work, Volume 24, p.675.

• 5. First US patent 372,786 and UK patent 15,232 1887.

• 6. ‘Phono Jack’, Emile Berliner , available at: http://phonojack.com/Berliner.htm.

• 7. Estreich, R. Emile Berliner , available at: http://www.bobsoldphones.net/Pages/Essays/Berliner/Berliner.htm.

• 8. History timeline, available at: http://www.emimusic.com/about/history/timeline/.

• 9. Nipper, available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nipper.

• 10. EMI Archives, 1887–1919, available at: http://www.emiarchivetrust.org/about/history-of-emi/.

• 11. Beardsley, R. (2009) High quality recording and reproducing of music and speech. Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music, available at: http://www.charm.rhul.ac.uk/history/p20_4_1_3.html.

• 12. Alan Blumlein , available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Blumlein .

• 13. British patent 394325. The application was in December 1931 and it was granted in 1933.

• 14. Bakker, G. The evolution of the British recorded music industry. BIS, Economics paper No 6, Department of Business, Innovation and Skills, also available at: http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20121212135622/http:/www.bis.gov.uk/assets/biscore/economics-and-statistics/docs/10-781-bis-economics-paper-06.

• 15. Vinyl Record Company. History of vinyl music records, available at: http://www.vinyl-record.co.uk/Pages/VinylRecordHistory.htm.

• 16. 45rpm.org. A history of the gramophone record, available at: http://www.45-rpm.org.uk/history.html.

• 17. Clark, M. and Nielsen, H. (1995) Crossed wires and missing connections. The American Telegraphone company, and the failure to commercialize magnetic recording. Business History Review, 69:1, 1.

• 18. Gavey, J.(1901) Poulsen ’s Telegraphone. IEE Journal, 30:151, 969.

• 19. Morton, D.L. (1993) ‘The Rusty Ribbon’: John Herbert Orr and the making of the Magnetic Recording Industry, 194–1960. Business History Review, 67:4, 589.

• 20. Sources for data: from 1973 to 2000, ONS, Social Trends 40: 2010 edition Chapter 13: Lifestyles and social participation; Before 1973 the figures are less secure. 1950–1973 based on production figures from Gouvish, T. and Tennett, K. (2010) Peterson and Berger revisited: Changing market dominance in the British popular music industry, c.1950–80. Business History, 52:2, 187–206, Table A1; UK recorded music production (millions), 1955–1980 which are compared with the overlap period from 1973 to 1980 to produce ratios between producing and sales. Before 1950 the figures are derived from Bakker, G. (2011) Adopting the rights-based model: Music multinationals and local music industries since 1945. Popular Music History, 6:3, 307–343, Figure 5, and assuming that the real value of records didn’t change during the period back to 1930. Before around 1973 the figures should be treated as only a general guide.

• 21. Lou Ottens , Godfather of the cassette and CD, available in Dutch at: http://www.mfbfreaks.com/geschiedenis/lou-ottens-peetvader-van-cassette-en-cd/.

• 22. Dolby, R. (1971) A noise reduction system for consumer tape recording. Audio Engineering Society, Paper of the Convention 1971, available at: http://www.dolby.com/uploadedFiles/Assets/US/Doc/Professional/Ray-Dolby-B-Type-Noise-Reduction.pdf.

• 23. Sony History, Chapter 6, Just try it, available at: http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/CorporateInfo/History/SonyHistory/2-06.html.

• 24. Riezenman, M.J. IEEE Milestone Honors, Creation of Compact Digital Audio Disc Player, IEEE 6 Feb 2009, available at: http://theinstitute.ieee.org/technology-focus/technology-history/ieee-milestone-honors-creation-of-compact-digital-audio-disc-player328.

• 25. Sony History, Chapter 9, Opposed by everyone, available at: http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/CorporateInfo/History/SonyHistory/2-09.html.

• 26. General Household Survey.

• 27. Deutsch patent DE 3912605.

• 28. Bellis, M. The History of MP3, available at: http://inventors.about.com/od/mstartinventions/a/MPThree.htm.

• 29. MP3 Licensing, The History of MP3, available at: http://www.mp3licensing.com/mp3/history.html.

• 30. iPod history, The history of mp3, available at: http://www.ipodhistory.com/.