Before music machines evolved into the wireless listening devices we have today, they started off as graphophones, gramophones and music boxes.
1800-1940: Phonographs and Record Players
People could stop and listen to audio, including music, jokes, and monologues at their leisure. Originally, a hand crank was used to rotate the cylinder as the needle found the groove to record sound vibrations of songs.
It's almost hard to reconstruct how different music was before the phonograph. Back in the mid-1800s, if you wanted to hear a song, you had only one option: live. You listened while someone played it, or else you played it yourself. That changed in 1877 when Thomas Edison unveiled his phonograph.
Americans did not buy prerecorded records or CDs and play them on stereo equipment. Instead, most American popular music was produced in the home, most likely on a piano, from sheet music purchased from one of many sheet music companies.
Radio was also wildly popular, offering many kinds of programs, from sermons to soap operas. In the 1930s, big bands and swing music were popular, with Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, and Glenn Miller popular bandleaders.
Many people in the war had a pressing need to be able to listen to the radio and 78-rpm shellac records en masse. By 1940, 96.2% of Northeastern American urban households had radio. The lowest American demographic to embrace mass distributed music, Southern rural families, still had 1 radio for every two households.
1920s popular music was shared through sheet music, piano rolls, and live shows. Prior to the creation of the recorded music industry, popular music was shared through sheet music, piano rolls, and live shows. The second influential technology that helped to create the modern music industry was commercial radio.
In the decade 1910–20 the phonograph became a truly mass medium for popular music, and recordings of large-scale orchestral works and other classical instrumental music proliferated.
1890, Nickel-in-the-Slot Phonograph
Arnold, this machine was a retrofitted Edison Class M Electric Phonograph. The added device was patented as the Coin Actuated Attachment for Phonograph and it allowed people to listen to music through four listening tubes.
By 1890, people had phonographs and were buying wax cylinders to listen to at home. Those cylinders held only about three minutes' worth of music at most, though, which caused a big change in the length of musical compositions: they got shorter.
Musical Instruments
Making music is a universal human trait that goes back to at least 35,000 years ago. Explore the evidence for some of the world's earliest musical instruments.
The mobile CD and mini-disk players made a brief appearance after the tape Walkman. Then came MP3 players and iPods in the 2000s. The convergence of the phone with other technologies has changed things again. Once the phone became a networked mobile music device, the limits of mobile listening were further unbound.
Digital distribution of music began to achieve prominence in the late 1990s and early 2000s; MP3.com and PeopleSound were the first two platforms, and early forerunners to platforms such as Spotify and Apple Music, offering the ability for musicians (including, especially, independent musicians) to upload and ...
Car Tape Decks
Generations could now listen to their own mixtapes while breezing down the highway. Cassette decks would come factory-installed on at least some new automobiles all the way up until 2011.
Radio continued to do so when the Great Depression (1929–41) caused declines in phonograph-record sales. Jukeboxes spread music throughout the country in taverns, soda fountains, and "juke joints," especially after the repeal of Prohibition (1920–33).
For years music was only made available to the masses on vinyl records, cassette tapes, and compact discs. However, in 1999 that all changed thanks to the introduction of streaming.
1888: 'The Lost Chord'
This is the earliest recording of music known to exist. In 1888 a recording of Arthur Sullivan's song 'The Lost Chord' was etched onto a phonograph cylinder.
In the developed world, swing, big band, jazz, Latin and country music dominated and defined the decade's music. After World War II, the big band sounds of the earlier part of the decade had been gradually replaced by crooners and vocal pop.
The phonograph was invented in 1877 by Thomas Edison.
Although many ordinary people had heard gramophones in seaside resorts or in park concerts organized by local councils, many more would discover the gramophone while in the army, since gramophone manufacturers produced large numbers of portable gramophones "for our soldiers in France".
Music in the 1920s in the United States had variety, to say the least! Jazz, blues, swing, dance band, and ragtime were just a few of the most popular music genres of the decade. Almost all of these genres originated from the creative work of African Americans influenced by their culture and heritage.
The Acoustic Era (1877–1925)
The earliest practical recording technologies were entirely mechanical devices. These recorders typically used a large conical horn to collect and focus the physical air pressure of the sound waves produced by the human voice or musical instruments.
The Jazz Age was a period in the 1920s and 1930s in which jazz music and dance styles gained worldwide popularity.
The period between the 1920s to 1930s is called the jazz age because the societal, religious, and lifestyle changes coincided with the rise of jazz culture and music.
Similar to flappers, jazz began to get a reputation as being immoral, and some older generations saw it as threatening their cultural values and promoting the new decadent values of the Roaring Twenties.