The successful introduction of the compact disc strengthened the grip that a few large companies held on the global entertainment industry. The new technology had emerged from their research laboratories, and its application was directed by the corporate strategies of control and consolidation. Marvelous new technologies which offered superior performance but could not be altered by the user were ideal products for the Empires of Sound. Like their other winning audio formats – 78-rpm shellac discs and 33-rpm vinyl records – CDs were read-only and could not be rerecorded. The new digital disc was the ideal weapon to fight unauthorized taping of copyrighted music because audio cassettes now sounded vastly inferior to digital reproduction. The CD was also expected to inject new life into a flat market for popular music in the 1980s as consumers were expected to make large outlays to replace their aging vinyl and cassettes with expensive digital discs.

The compact disc was the vanguard of the next generation of leisure time products based on the digital transmission and reproduction of sound. A common technological foundation made it easier to group several kinds of entertainment into one business organization. Digital sound technology was to be the platform for bigger and more diverse media conglomerates; it became the building block of several new entertainment empires.

In the record business, the policy of consolidation was almost as old as the acoustic technology that made sound recording possible. The Empires of Sound had always eaten up smaller competitors, and this feeding continued at a faster pace in the digital era. The majors were omnivorous, swallowing up the old independent record companies, which had valuable catalogs of sixties music, such as Chess (bought by MCA) and Motown and A&M (taken over by Polygram). They also took over the newer labels that had a finger on the pulse of contemporary culture. Every new wave in American popular music – however alienated and disaffected – was effortlessly incorporated into the system and its energy harnessed.

What effect did the revolution in sound have on the music that was recorded? For technological determinists, those who believe that technology is the wellspring of change, the postwar innovations appeared to have an immediate impact on the world of music. A few years after the introduction of tape-recording machines and microgroove discs, a new type of popular music burst upon the scene. Often described as a force of dramatic change in American history, the product of an enormous cultural revolution, rock'n'roll became the most influential popular music of the twentieth century. Rock'n'roll was by no means “the only revolution in the 80-year-old history of the American record industry” as some have claimed, but it made a much greater impact on American society than an earlier revolutionary form of popular music – jazz – and its effect lasted much longer. Rock as a musical style and a way of life moved effortlessly into film and television, dominating the cultural landscape for decades.

It had a dramatic new sound, an electric sound, which was characterized by the ringing tones of electric guitars amplified through loudspeakers. Electrification had not only been used in the recording process; the electric pick-up and amplifier had replaced the acoustic soundbox of the guitar with unlimited power. The sound of the crashing power chords of the electric guitar was to become the trademark of rock'n'roll.

Yet it was more than the guitar sound that made rock recordings different. There was an edge, that special reverberating echo, that can be heard in such quintessential rock'n'roll records as “Heartbreak Hotel” (Elvis Presley), “Be-Bop A Lula” (Gene Vincent), and “Summertime Blues” (Eddie Cochran). The sound of guitars and voices was changed in the recording studio to give these records a dimension different from recordings of other popular music.

It was not difficult to find a link between the revolution in sound recording and the new sound of rock'n'roll; the music came hot on the heels of the tape recorder and the microgroove disc. In fact the 7-inch, 45-rpm disc provides us with the prime artifact of rock'n'roll; much smaller and lighter than the 78, its much larger center hole created a different shape.

America on Record is an attempt to describe the technological development and cultural impact of sound recording from its inception to the early 1990s – “from Edison's phonograph to gangsta rap,” as one reviewer put it. As space is limited, I have not provided a full account of the technology or its cultural effects – I leave this to the experts – but instead a concise narrative which covers the significant events and explains the relationship of these two important forces. This is an interdisciplinary book intended for students in History and American Studies, and their pressing schedules have been uppermost in my mind during the preparation of the manuscript.

The history was written during a time of rapid technological advance, and I have no doubt that more innovations in digital sound recording will have been made before the book appears in print. I ask the reader's indulgence for sections that may appear outdated and hope that the machines described in the closing chapters have not become obsolete in the short time from manuscript to published book.

Researching and writing this book was truly a pleasure. I owe a great debt to Raymond Wyman, Professor Emeritus of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, who not only read the manuscript several times but also gave me the benefit of his years of experience with audio visual technology. Peter Copeland, recording engineer and Conservation Manager of the British Library National Sound Archive in London, also went through the manuscript and helped me understand much of the technology. My friend Ed Pershey of the Tsongas Industrial History Center was full of his usual insights and guided me along the path to a readable book.

Several important archives were made available to me. I want to thank the staff of the Edison National Historic Site, especially Doug Tarr and Jerry Fabris; Sam Brylawski of the Recorded Sound Reference Center at the Library of Congress; Dan Morgenstern of the Institute of Jazz Studies, Newark; Emmett Chisum of the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming, Laramie; Dick Cooper of the Alabama Music Hall of Fame; and Tina McCarthy of the Sony/ CBS music archives, New York.

Diffusion of recording techniques from sound stages to the studios of the record companies was slow. The first time that several microphones were used to record a large group of musicians was in 1926 in the Metropolitan Opera House in New York to make synchronized recordings for Vitaphone films. Engineers from the Victor Company thought that one microphone placed in the auditorium was best, but the Vitaphone recorders wanted to use six: one each for strings, brass, woodwinds, basses, and percussion, and one for the overall sound. They made a recording of each setup and compared the two. There was no doubt that the multi-microphone technique produced clearer and more lifelike sound.

This test did not lead to general use of multiple microphones in the recording industry; common practice in the 1930s was to place one microphone above the musicians. The transition to multi-miking came slowly. At first engineers employed two microphones for large groups and orchestras, one at the front and one at the back. Later they added other microphones to pick up the bass section or the soloists. This procedure was established in the large recording studios by the end of the 1930s, but recorders in smaller studios still used one or two microphones.

Studio recorders did not attempt to create several tracks of a recording and mix them together; and actually the single microphone recording can bring out all the sounds of a large orchestra. Benny Goodman's historic Carnegie Hall concert of 1938, for example, was recorded by one microphone over the band, which conveyed its sound to the CBS studios for transcription. The emphasis in the record business was on the realistic reproduction of a live performance, and once the recording had been made, there was little thought of altering it in any way to make it sound better.

Although the technique of re-recording was not unknown to the engineers in record studios, it was very rarely employed by them in the 1930s.

The competition between cylinder and disc, and lateral and hill-and-dale cut, had been fierce, but it paled in comparison to the threat of a new technology which appeared in the mid-1920s. Not since Edison's invention of the phonograph had the American public been so excited about a new entertainment technology as it was about radio. “In all the history of inventing nothing has approached the rise of radio from obscurity to power,” announced one popular magazine. The “radio craze” was a devastating blow to an already depressed industry which had barely survived the postwar depression of the early 1920s. It was not a threat of improved reproduction but of a new method of delivering the same entertainment. The music heard on the radio was free, and the listener had access to a library of music that was beyond the resources of all but the most determined record collector.

Radio had been originally conceived as a method of telegraphing without wires; by the early twentieth century, it was used to send messages to ships at sea with Morse code. But in the same way that telegraphy gave way to telephony, the wireless telegraph developed into a technology that could transmit the sound of speech through the air to millions of homes. Some inventors saw beyond the point-to-point transmission of radio messages to the transmission of music to an infinite number of listeners. The independent inventor Lee De Forest must be given the credit for the idea of using radio waves to broadcast information and music, although he was not the first to play music over the air waves. Reginald Fessenden, who had once worked for Edison at the West Orange laboratory, had achieved that feat in 1906 with an experimental transmission from Brant Rock, Massachusetts. De Forest's dream of broadcasting, the “invisible empire of the air” as he called it, was demonstrated in an extraordinary experiment carried out in 1910 in New York City.

As the phonograph approached its 100th birthday in 1977, Edison would have been well pleased with the progress of his favorite invention. The technology of electrical recording had been dramatically improved after 1945, and the range of frequencies reproduced by recorded sound had slowly increased: the microgroove record covered a range from 30 to 10,000 cps, and the stereo units of the 1960s extended the range far up into the high frequencies, around 15,000 cps. The modern phonograph captured most of the audible sounds of music and speech, with low levels of noise and distortion. The realistic stereo reproduction of sound, which had not even been dreamed of during the acoustic era, was made a reality in the 1960s.

These advances would have no doubt pleased Edison the inventor, but Edison the businessman would have been equally impressed with the low price and wide availability of this technology. High fidelity had been brought within the budget of the majority of Americans in the 1970s, and there cannot have been many families who did not enjoy the benefits of recorded sound in one form or another. The annual sales of audio products in the United States had risen from $1.7 billion in 1975 to $4.1 billion in 1979: $1 billion in pre-recorded cassettes, $1 billion in eight-track tapes, and $2.1 billion in discs.

Despite all the technological advances and improvements, the basic talking-machine format determined by Edison and Berliner had remained unchanged. A stylus still ran along the groove and reproduced the analogue signal of sound modulated into it. Berliner's revolving-disc idea had stood the test of time and now dominated recorded sound despite the steady diffusion of magnetic tape. Whatever the advantages of tape, it still had not displaced the disc as the dominant format. The disc was still going strong in the 1970s and looked like it might last another hundred years.

The microgroove long-playing disc was perhaps the greatest achievement of the industry of recorded sound.

The move to talking pictures required a massive construction program. The cost to rebuild Hollywood's studios ranged from $23 million to $50 million. When compared with the estimate of the value of the original studios, which was around $65 million, this was a staggering amount of capital. Film producers had to borrow millions of dollars to make the conversion to sound. The recovery of these fixed costs pushed them into making the most of their resources by mass-producing films. Although the adoption of these manufacturing techniques had begun before World War I, the transition to sound in the film industry gave it more impetus, pushing the producers to standardize their output and exert more control over production. Sound shaped the way they made films and determined what kind of films they made.

Sound also had a profound effect on the film exhibitors, the businesses which showed the films made by the producers. They were faced with the expense of re-equipping their theaters with special projectors to show talking pictures and installing amplifiers and loudspeakers to reproduce the sound. Depending on the size of the theater, this job could cost over $20,000, and this made it too expensive for small businesses that were often forced to sell out to a larger organization. The independent exhibitors were swallowed up as sound became the standard.

The history of the American film industry is punctuated by struggles between exhibitors and producers. Synchronized sound shifted the balance of power to the film producers, who were encouraged by the prospects of talking pictures to buy theaters and wire them for sound. The studio system that flourished during the Golden Age of Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s was established by these fully integrated film companies that had moved into sound.

The process of forward integration by film producers into exhibition had begun well before the coming of sound, but the enormous income from talking pictures accelerated the process. The talkies captured the public's attention and created one of the most profitable periods in the history of Hollywood.

Edison always said that the phonograph was his only real discovery, the only invention he stumbled upon rather than deliberately set out to find. Having invented it, he then had to find a use for it. Musical entertainment was one of the first uses he predicted for the phonograph, although it was by no means the only one. The inventors claimed that it would change education, politics, and business communication in addition to providing entertainment. Edison also thought it could be adapted for phonographic books for the blind, the teaching of elocution, and speaking clocks.

The phonograph was invented to save telephone messages, and the ability to record speech opened up several commercial uses. Chief among these was its employment as a dictating machine for businessmen. A talking machine could be used to replace the tedious exchange of letters with the recorded message of the phonograph cylinder. The inventors hoped that the cylinder could be sent through the mail with the ease of a letter. The advantage was that the recipient got an exact record of the sender's message as he dictated it, substituting a sound recording for correspondence. The paperless business office was anticipated well before the advent of personal computers and modems.

Edison hoped that this idea would transform office work. The electric light, telephone, and typewriter were slowly changing the American office, facilitating the task of managing the larger business organizations of the late nineteenth century. When used as a dictating machine, the phonograph promised to further ease the burden of business administration by mechanizing correspondence. The device that had begun as a complement to the telephone was now seen as an adjunct to the typewriter.

At the same time that Edison was imagining the phonograph as the ultimate business tool, he also made a prophetic statement about its future. “This machine,” he wrote in 1878, shortly after the clamor surrounding the invention had died down, “can only be built on the American principle of interchangeability of parts like a gun or a sewing machine.”

The company that developed the tape cassette was a multinational electrical manufacturer. The Philips corporation of Holland began by manufacturing Edison's incandescent bulbs and became one of the largest electronics concerns in Europe. It made a variety of electrical equipment including televisions, radios, tape recorders, and home stereos. It developed elements of the cassette technology with the Theo Staar engineering concern of Belgium and worked closely with large Japanese electrical manufacturers such as Sony and Matsushita in designing cassette players. Philips also owned the PolyGram record group, which provided software for its players.

Philips was a large, diversified group of companies, a conglomerate, with interests in both the machines and the music they played. With their varied interests in numerous lines of business, and their strong commitment to research and development, the media conglomerates were ideally positioned to exploit new trends in entertainment and technology.

The merger movement which created media conglomerates began in the 1960s and in many ways reflected the consolidations of the 1930s, when large corporations bought out smaller companies. Instead of depression, profit was the cause of the takeover trend of the 1960s. The total record sales of $6 million in 1960 doubled to $1.2 billion by the end of the decade, making the record business a highly profitable undertaking.

This dramatic increase in sales was basically the result of a change in format for popular records. The 45-rpm single had always been the format for rock'n'roll, but the Beatles changed this with LPs such as “Sgt. Pepper.” This was a landmark recording not only because it made rock more acceptable to adults; it moved rock from the 45- to 33-rpm format. The baby boomers were growing up, and the concept album or “rock opera” replaced the 45-rpm single in their record collections. At $4.98 a unit, compared with the 98$ single, the popular-music LP was the foundation of the huge volume of sales in the late 1960s and 1970s – the maturing baby boom audience was purchasing LPs instead of singles.

The 1920s will always be remembered as the decade of prohibition, unrestrained hedonism, and the wild excesses of its “flaming” youth. There were radical changes in social behavior and in the way young people looked, dressed, and acted. Jazz reflected the lifestyle and aspirations of this affluent group, who had found “a native American music as traditionally wild, happy, disenchanted, and unfettered as it had become fashionable for them to think they had become.” Jazz expressed this reckless exuberance so well that the name given to the 1920s by F. Scott Fitzgerald has remained ever since.

Despite its image of wild abandon, jazz was a carefully crafted music that was created and promoted by the industry of recorded sound. It was another stage in the process of adapting African American music for popular consumption: a process that had begun with the coon song and was to continue through rock ‘n’ roll to rap. The single most important cultural accomplishment of the industry of recorded sound in the twentieth century was to make the music of black Americans the popular music of the world.

At each stage of this process, the cultural identity of African Americans was systematically removed from the music, making the final recording a commercial product which could conform to the values of a white society. The coon song came from the minstrel shows that supposedly represented “genuine darky life in the South” but which were the work of white performers in grease paint or burnt cork. A small number of black touring troupes were organized and controlled by whites. Although inspired by the African American culture of the slave plantation, the minstrel shows were a travesty of slave music and dance arranged for white audiences.

The same could be said for the coon songs on record. One only has to consider the titles of the most popular recordings to see this.

In the 1930s popular music was created within the interlocking systems of record production, film making, and radio broadcasting. A newly recorded song required extensive promotion on radio and in movies to bring it to the attention of the record-buying public. Al Jolson was the first of many entertainment stars to move from vaudeville to movies and then to radio. Throughout the 1930s the leading figures in popular entertainment – such as Rudy Vallee, Bing Crosby, and Fred Astaire – were active in recording, films, and radio. They reinforced their images in the three media and used film and radio to plug their songs. Overseas record and film sales brought their music to an international audience. The great sales networks created by Edison and Johnson could not compare to this.

The beginning point of this extended technological system was the ubiquitous microphone. In recording studio, film stage, or dance hall, it picked up the sound of a performance and turned it into the electrical currents which ran through the empires of sound. Wherever a big band played, it could be connected to this national network by a radio “wire” – the cable that ran from the microphone on the bandstand to the local radio station, which then broadcast the performance nationwide. A transcription machine in the broadcast studio made a permanent record which could be played later.

Radio exposure was vital in marketing a recording, because the networks brought music to all parts of the country. A wire installed in the famous “Cotton Club” in Harlem brought Duke Ellington's band national exposure, as it did for Cab Calloway. Even local radio programs could attract promoters and sponsors. The story of the discovery of Count Basie's band is worth retelling. Basie's sets at the Reno Club in Kansas City were sent over the wire to the experimental radio station, W9XBY. The independent producer John Hammond heard a broadcast late one night on his car radio and was so impressed that he drove to Kansas City and offered a contract to Basie.

Recorded sound is surely one of the great conveniences of modern life. We can conjure up sounds at will from a talking machine, not just the sound of our own voices but the finest music ever made, and all with the convenience of a touch of a button. In a world oppressed by the consequences of progress, the phonograph and its descendants have provided us with cheap and plentiful distraction in the comfort of our own homes. It has made living in small, windowless, air-conditioned rooms a little easier, replacing the shared Victorian pleasures of bandstand and music hall with the solitary delight of a private world of sound.

The novelty of hearing a recording of one's voice is a little over 100 years old. In November 1877 Thomas Edison invented the phonograph in his Menlo Park laboratory, a feat which earned him worldwide fame and the nickname of “The Wizard of Menlo Park.” Although the term phonograph had been coined years before, this famous invention marked the real beginning of recorded sound technology. To the millions of Americans and Europeans who marvelled at what they thought was a great scientific achievement, Edison's phonograph perfectly represented the new machines which were changing their lives: the telephone, electric light, safety razor, street car, camera, and automobile. The phonograph provided a service which had been unimaginable to its listeners before 1877 – it was truly a modern technology.

In the late nineteenth century, it was not only inventors who looked into the future and saw a marvelous new age created by machines. In 1888 the writer and social reformer Edward Bellamy published Looking Backward, 2000—1887, a view of a future society “so simple and logical” in which many of the burdens of industrial America had been lifted. One of the features of this utopia was that the finest music was piped into homes by telephone wires from special studios where professional musicians played around the clock.

The period from 1900 to 1920 marked the high point in the fortunes of the talking machine. With a small interruption caused by the depression of 1907, each succeeding year of the twentieth century brought higher sales. A record player stood proudly in the sitting rooms of millions of Americans, and there was little to challenge its position as the leading form of home entertainment. Where once only the upper classes could enjoy fine music, usually in the form of a piano, now everybody could afford it. The phonograph had ushered in the age of mechanical entertainment in America, and it was to prepare the ground for many other high-tech entertainers in the future.

The Big Three had succeeded in the daunting task of mass-producing complex machines and pressing millions of exact duplicates of recordings. They had built massive industrial plants. Their interests ranged from stockpiles of chemicals used in their records to contracts with well-known musicians and singers. They had recorded some of the world's greatest musical figures and made a permanent record of their art.

Each of the Big Three did millions of dollars of business each year. In 1914 the U.S. census found that there were eighteen manufacturing establishments in the industry with a total value of output that exceeded $27 million. Of this total $4 million was accounted for by Edison and $16 million by Victor.

Edison, Victor, and Columbia held almost every important patent for talking machines and records. The legal battles among them slowly grew less violent and disruptive in the second decade of the twentieth century, although Victor did its best to prosecute those who had infringed on its Victrola patents. The entry of Edison into the disc market in 1913 did not bring the legal battle that his lawyers had feared: the Edison Diamond Disc player was not too blatant a copy of the Victrola, and it did not threaten Victor's sales.

The place where records are made is usually called a studio, but in Edison's day it was often called a laboratory. The Big Three companies used this term to give their customers the impression that sound recording was constantly being improved, which it was. The first recording studio was established in Thomas Edison's West Orange laboratory in 1888. It was on the top floor of the main laboratory building, a large open space under a vaulted ceiling. During the frantic campaign to perfect the phonograph in 1888, Edison's men hauled a piano up there and used it for experiments on recording. At first this work was carried out in the open space of the room, but soon the recording phonograph was enclosed behind a wooden partition, with only the horn showing through it at head height. The musicians crowded around the horn, while the experimenters and their machinery remained out of sight behind the acoustic barrier – an important physical distinction had been made between artist and technician. Absolute silence was maintained while the recording was made. The first steps towards the recording studio had been taken.

Another common term used to describe a studio was recording room; usually this is exactly what it was, a room in the factory or offices of a record company. The first gramophone recording studio was over a shoe shop on 12th Street in Philadelphia. When Fred Gaisberg went to England, he set up the studio for the Gramophone Company in the basement room of its offices in London. The recording room for the United States Phonograph Company in 1892 was a loft over a meat packing house.

Even these humble spaces were a great improvement over the hotel rooms, penny arcades, and parlors that had acted as recording facilities for the first group of entrepreneurs engaged in producing commercial records. In the early 1890s, penny arcade operators and travelling phonograph exhibitors needed pre-recorded cylinders and discs, and they made records by the dozen wherever they could.

When the inventors grasped the commercial opportunities for pre-recorded sound, they gave little consideration to what kind of music would be recorded, unaware of the importance that it would have for their businesses. Faced with the challenge of duplicating discs or cylinders, they saw recording as another technical problem, and the limitations of acoustic recording basically determined what music could be put on record.

The wave form cut into the wax changed proportionately with the pitch of the sound during recording: high frequencies caused narrow, densely packed waves, while the low notes caused the stylus to move longer distances to create longer wave forms. Loud sounds or deep bass notes forced the stylus to the edge of the groove and sometimes beyond it, ruining the recording. Drums were therefore excluded from recording studios, and technicians always waited with nervous anticipation as singers reached for the climactic high notes. Too loud a recording made the diaphragm vibrate rapidly, causing “blasting” on the playback, which distorted the sound.

The early talking machines were unable to reproduce certain sounds, especially the sibilants or “S” sounds. The soft sounds of string instruments, such as the cello and violin, were difficult to reproduce. The stroh violin, which had a sound box and horn attached to it, was developed for acoustic recording. As bass notes were very hard for the horn to pick up, tubas were often used to provide the bass. The piano also presented difficulties. Technicians took the back off an upright piano and then lifted it up onto boxes to bring the instrument full into the horn. Pianists were instructed to play loudly, “double forte.” The piano sound reproduced by the phonograph was harsher and more percussive than the original. Critics of the talking machine described its thin, metallic tone as “tinny.”

The first recording engineers, called recorders, had a limited number of choices of what to record.