The History of Recorded Music

Thomas Edison's laboratory demonstrated the tinfoil phonograph, the first device to record and play back sound. Edison recited "Mary had a little lamb" on an early machine, and the invention was hailed in newspapers as a marvel. Edison initially imagined it as an office dictation tool rather than an entertainment medium.

Location: Menlo Park, New Jersey, USA

German-born inventor Emile Berliner patented the gramophone, which used flat disc records instead of cylinders. Discs were easier to mass-produce by pressing, and their flat shape enabled centralized manufacturing and longer distribution. Berliner also founded what became the Victor Talking Machine Company, whose "His Master's Voice" logo became iconic.

Location: Washington, D.C., USA

Enrico Caruso recorded ten arias for the Gramophone Company in a Milan hotel room for a flat fee and no royalties. The recordings sold over a million copies, proving that recorded performances could be mass consumer products and turning opera singers into international celebrities. The sessions established the royalty economics of the record business.

Location: Milan, Italy

Western Electric's microphone and amplifier technology replaced purely acoustic recording, adopted by Victor and Columbia in 1925. Electrical recording captured a far wider frequency range, enabling natural-sounding ensembles and the rise of crooning vocal styles, exemplified by Bing Crosby, that had been inaudible against acoustic horns.

Columbia Records introduced the 33 1/3 rpm long-playing vinyl record, holding over 20 minutes per side, followed in 1949 by RCA Victor's 45 rpm single. Vinyl's durability and length defined the album as an artistic format for the next four decades and enabled the album-era economics of the record industry.

Location: New York, USA

Philips introduced the compact cassette at a Berlin radio fair. Originally a dictation format, it became a music medium and, with the later Walkman, made recorded music personal and portable. Home taping also triggered the first major industry campaign against consumer copying in the 1980s.

Location: Eindhoven, Netherlands

Sony launched the Walkman, a portable cassette player that let people listen to music while walking. It sold hundreds of millions of units and changed urban life, creating the personal soundtrack and public solitude that became hallmarks of modern listening.

Location: Tokyo, Japan

Sony and Philips jointly launched the compact disc, with Billy Joel's "52nd Street" among the first commercial releases. Digital sound without physical wear, and later the ability to rip perfect copies, set the stage for both the CD boom of the late 1980s and the copying crisis that followed.

Location: Tokyo, Japan

Shawn Fanning launched Napster, letting users share MP3 files freely. Global music sales, which had peaked in 1999, fell by roughly 40 percent over the following decade. The Recording Industry Association of America's lawsuits shut Napster down in 2001, but file-sharing migrated to successors, and the industry's legal war on its own customers became a defining business case study.

Location: Boston, Massachusetts, USA

Apple opened the iTunes Music Store, selling songs at 99 cents after convincing major labels to license a la carte downloads. Combined with the iPod, it rebuilt digital revenue and gave Apple gatekeeping power over music retail that labels came to resent, setting up later disputes over platform economics.

Location: Cupertino, California, USA

Spotify, launched in Europe in 2008, led the shift to subscription streaming, which overtook download sales in the United States around 2015 and subsequently revived industry revenues to new highs. The model's per-stream fractions of a cent reignited debates over how royalties are split among labels, platforms, and artists.