The Record Industry Comes to the Orient

A critical survey of museum collections of popular music in the United Kingdom

“…As Gronow observed over thirty years ago, the scarcity of such material can, in part, be accounted for because documents were often destroyed by music companies 'in their haste to throw away useless old material, and by professional archivists and librarians who have frequently rejected and even destroyed catalogues and other ephemeral printed materials related to the industry' (Gronow, 1981: 276). Moreover, their presence within a museum collection is significant because even where archival documents do exist, these materials have often not been made publicly available (Gronow, 1981;Grenier, 2001). …”

The World’s Greatest Sound Archive.

“…The disc record industry developed from the gramophone, invented by Emile Berliner in 1887� After several years of experimentation, the first successful businesses got underway around 1900� The Gramophone Company was founded in the UK in 1898, and the Victor Talking Machine Company in the U�S� in 1901� The public enthusiastically welcomed recorded music, and within seven years the sales of the Victor company alone increased from 250,000 to 7�6 million records (Mainspring Press 2009)� By 1907 growth had leveled off, but there was now a flourishing record industry in the U�S�, UK, France, and Germany� Berliner's basic patents had expired, and Gramophone and Victor had several competitors� Although the production of gramophones and discs was concentrated in the largest industrialized countries, they were marketed in practically all countries of the world� Lady Catherine Macartney, the wife of the British Consul in Kashgar, Xinjiang, China recalls in her memoirs an unexpected encounter with the gramophone in 1908 (Macartney 1931: 87)� The trip from Kashgar to the nearest railway station took two months by horseback, yak, and foot, but resting overnight in a small mountain village in the Tien Shan Mountains she was entertained by a gramophone, a proud possession of a village elder� By the outbreak of the First World War, gramophone records were widely circulated� In the largest industrial countries with the highest standard of living, gramophones were within the reach of the ordinary working man� More than ten million records were sold in the UK annually (Martland 1992)� In smaller European countries, the penetration was lower, but foreign trade statistics show that more than 150,000 records were imported to Sweden in 1908 from Germany alone (Englund and Gronow 2011)� Outside Europe, recordings may only have been within the reach of a wealthy minority, but this was large enough to support a flourishing business� Germany exported 622,000 records to British India in 1907, and in the same year the Gramophone Company opened the first record factory in India to supply local demand (Gronow 1981)� At this time, most records were produced by a small number of multinational firms with subsidiaries and agents in many countries� Gramophone in Europe and Victor in America were the market leaders, but there were half a dozen other important companies competing with them� The French Pathé company was also strong in Russia, and in 1920 it opened the first record factory in China� There were also smaller factories operated by local businessmen in Poland, Turkey, Italy, Hungary, and other countries, but they often found it difficult to compete with the international companies (see, e�g�, Lerski 2004;Marton and Bajnai 2008;Gössel 2006)�…”

Media-Capitalism: Colloquial Mass Culture and Nationalism in Egypt, 1908–18

“…From 1900 to 1910 the Gramophone Corporation alone marketed 1,192 different records in Egypt. 27 The 1913-14 Egyptian catalogue for the Odeon Corporation lists a total of 458 records for the Egyptian domestic market. 28 It is unfortunate that we do not have any official figures for the Polyphon, Baidaphon, Pathé, and Mechian corporations, which were also very active during this period.…”