Common sense tells us that sound recording — that is, records and cassettes - is a mass medium just newspapers, films or television. In industrialised countries, listening to records is just as much part of everyday life as reading the newspaper or listening to the radio. A Swedish survey made in 1976 (Anon. 1979, pp. 85–8) indicates that, on average, Swedish adults spent thirty-five minutes daily reading newspapers, thirty-three minutes listening to records or cassettes and one minute watching films. Watching films on television was not included, but neither was listening to records on the radio.

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Inventing recorded music: the recorded repertoire in Scandinavia 1899-1925 PEKKA GRONOW † and BJÖRN ENGLUND ‡ †Box 15, 00024 YLEISRADIO, Finland ‡Carl Malmstens väg 12, Abstract The first Scandinavian records appeared in 1899. By 1925, over 27,000 sides had been made in the region, and recordings had become an established part of musical life. Half of the recordings were made by the Gramophone Company, the market leader, but there were at least a dozen competing firms. The companies had to find out by trial and error what types of music would be attractive to customers. Early recording artists were mostly well-known personalities from opera, theatre or music halls, and their repertoire had already been tried on the stage.Most Scandinavian records were pressed in Germany or the United Kingdom, and the companies also promoted their international repertoire in the region, but customers preferred local artists. A hundred years ago, opera singers were the only internationally known recording artists. Popular music was tied to local languages and traditions, and a demand for imported popular music only emerged after World War One, with the growing popularity of modern dance music.Downloaded

The recording industry is now over 120 years old. During the first half of its existence, however, few archives documented or collected its products. Many early recordings have been lost, and discography, the documentation of historical recordings, has mainly been in the hands of private collectors. An emphasis on genre-based discographies such as jazz or opera has often left other areas of record production in the shade. Recent years have seen a growth of national sound collections with online catalogues and at least partial online access to content. While academic historians have been slow to approach the field, there has been outstanding new research on the history of the recording industry, particularly in the USA and UK. This has encouraged the development of new academic research on musical performance, based on historical sound recordings. The article discusses some recent works in this field.

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