Recording the History of Recording: A Retrospective of the Field

Abstract

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.

Was punk DIY? Is DIY punk? Interrogating the DIY/punk nexus, with particular reference to the early UK punk scene, c. 1976–1984

“…In a familiar narrative, the development of what he conflatingly calls ‘the DIY indie scene’ (Dale, 2008: 173) begins with self-released records in the UK such as Buzzcocks’ Spiral Scratch EP (1977), while a few years earlier in the US acts such as Television, Patti Smith and the Flaming Groovies had all released their first or early singles on small new independent labels (Dale, 2008: 174–175), as indeed had Australian punk band the Saints with ‘I’m stranded’ on their own label Fatal Records in 1976. I do not dispute that this would become a significant and productive trend: Gronow and Saunio's discography of punk up to 1982 identifies 16,000 releases from 3000 independent labels, primarily but not exclusively in the USA and the UK (1998: 163). The laying bare of the process of production in a demystifying and self-referential gesture of the British acts does extend the practice in an important way, but this was very rare, even within punk's new(ish) field of grassroots cultural production of self-released 7″ singles.…”

The cost of music

“…The data represent ‘units sold’ whenever such information was available, although in some cases (namely the early years of cylinders and 78s), figures for ‘units produced’ were used as the closest estimate available. We used 20 separate data points for production numbers between 1890 and 1920, drawing from a range of primary sources ( Edison Phonograph Monthly , The Phonoscope , US Department of Commerce) and secondary sources (Gelatt 1977; Gronow 1999; Koenigsberg 1969; Klinger 2007; Martland 2013; Wile 2008). (All sources for individual data points are referenced itemised in our accompanying online dataset – see Brennan and Archibald 2019; Figure 2.)…”

Pie laika … Now is the time. The singing revolution on Latvian radio and television

“…To make a record, he or she had to be included in the annual production plan, and the number of records pressed was also determined centrally. The state record company did not publish figures of the sales of individual records, and there were no ‘top 10’ lists to gauge the relative popularity of artists (Gronow and Saunio 1999, pp. 179–81).…”