A Thought About Technology and Music

Before Edison invented the phonograph in 1877 the only way to hear music was to directly hear a person making the music. (The player piano and mechanical music box being minor exceptions to this point.) When my parents were children a century ago, people still made music in the home as a major form of entertainment, but the phonograph switched people from making music in the home to listening to recorded music there. While Aubrey and Maturin may have played violin-cello duets in Patrick O'Brian's nautical novels, I suspect that most of the music played in the household was relatively simple, memorable and traditional.

By World War II people listened to music on the radio in the United States. A few radio networks dominated the airwaves and those networks had a major impact on the music tastes of their huge audiences. The audience for the short play records of the day was based on the music made popular by network radio. That music was developed for a least-common-denominator mass audience, yet there was also a considerable pressure for novelty in the specific songs and artists.

The post war years saw market penetration of television, a shift of radio from a primary to a secondary source of entertainment but one which had large numbers of stations available in at least the urban markets, and the introduction of long play records. It has been suggested that the market for music changed as a result of these changes in technology, creating a larger number of niche markets to substitute for the mass market for "June-Moon" "popular" music. Of course, the market also opened to longer pieces of music and to compilations of numbers of pieces recorded by the same artists in a single recording session.

Today we see that digital music has replaced analog recording; music in increasingly downloaded from the Internet rather than obtained via radio or purchased from record stores. People increasingly download single pieces of music rather than compilations. Digital players have become personal, carried with the listener everywhere, rather than household devices literally wired into the household electric supply. A "long tail" has has developed in music as well as in literature with a much greater variety of music finding listeners.

My point is that the music we listen too is very much a function of the technology we use to listen to that music.