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7.3.1 Introduction

Temporal categories serve as the basis for our estimation of difference between peri- ods in musical history, and we describe various categorisations based upon musical technology. The eras we isolate are technologically and socially defined, being based upon the dominant music dissemination technologies in those periods.

7.3.2 Classification by Technology

Various authors have aattempted to classify music recording and dissemination tech- nologies. Burrows (2017), for example, suggests the following categories which specif- ically track recording:

Technological Era Timespan

Acoustic 1877-1924

Electrical 1925-1945

Magnetic 1946-1974

Digital 1975-present

Table 7.3.1: Temporal categories (Burrows, 2017).

Patmore (2009), referring to Ehrlich (1998), offers a different categorisation:

Technological Era Timespan

Recording horn and cylinder 1877-c1907

Acoustic disc c1907-c1925

Microphone and electrical recording c1925-c1948 Tape recording and vinyl LP c1948-c1983 Digital sound and the CD c1983-c1998 Table 7.3.2: Temporal categories (Patmore, 2009).

Our analyses require the inclusion of the Internet and a ‘cassette’ era (to capture the effects of home recording upon the period overlapping the vinyl and digital eras), in a

similar manner to Patmore (2009). Finally, a need to be dependent upon dissemina-

tion technology rather than recording technology means we define our categories as

follows:

Technological Era Short-form Timespan Pre-recording pre-rec 1430-1899

Phonograph phono 1900-1920

Radio radio 1921-1954

Microgroove (vinyl) micro 1955-1971

Cassette cass 1972-1987

Digital dig 1988-1997

Internet net 1998-2007

Social media sm 2008-2015

Table 7.3.3: Temporal categories.

N. B. The pre-recording era start-year depends on the dataset being analysed. The ear- liest date used in this work is 1430 (from the date-corrected dataset), since no artists from earlier periods, with adequate documentation for initial inclusion, survived the clustering process.

These categories are used in the analyses of genre proliferation (described in Sec- tion 7.4), as well as in later work with genre networks and hybridity analyses (Chap- ters 8 and 9), and are based on the following premises:

Pre-Recording

This work is fundamentally about recorded music, but we consider it essential to in- clude this category. Clearly, music was distributed before recording, in the form of the score, so our first category could be named in this way. However, we would then have to consider breaking it down into more subcategories, and the lack of data fails to justify this. Therefore we label our first category the ‘pre-recording’ era, making it dependant upon the absence of a technology.

The Phonograph

Although not the first recording medium, the phonograph was the first to have a sig- nificant impact on the distribution of recorded music. Invented in 1877 (Goodrich et al., 2011), it took over two decades for the phonograph to become a significant ob-

ject of commerce: gramophone records were first patented by Emile Berliner in 1887 (McKnight, 2014), and the commercial boom in recorded music sales began in the early twentieth century (Shuker, 2016). We therefore define the ‘pre-recording’ (pre- rec) era as ending in 1899, and describe this final year as the Omega Year (or ΩY). Radio

The era of pervasive broadcast radio is defined by the date of the first commercial broadcast by the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) (1921). The BBC began broad- casting a year later, and 200,000 radio reception licences were granted in the UK in 1923 with the number rising to 600,000 in 1924 (Jones, 2012). The ‘phonograph’ (phono) era therefore has an ΩY of 1920, and the radio era begins in 1921. Arguably the broad- cast of music via radio has had as large an impact on popular music as recording it- self. Production of 78 RPM records continued in the US until 1959 and the UK until 1961, but their commercial significance faded. Radio remained the dominant musi- cal outlet, becoming a prominent method of marketing for new a format, the vinyl ‘microgroove’ record.

Microgroove

Microgroove (33 and 45 RPM) records, introduced in 1948/49, were outselling 78s by 1955 (Bartmanski and Woodward, 2015). Our definition of the ‘radio’ era (radio) there- fore extends to 1954, where ‘microgroove’ takes over. This does not, of course, signify the end of radio, but the vinyl microgroove record becomes the pre-eminent object of dissemination in our categorisation, until 1971 when recordable media become a factor.

Cassette

The compact cassette, was introduced in 1963 by Philips Electronics (Rothman, 2013) but did not become truly pervasive for several years. By 1967 over 70 record labels were selling pre-recorded albums on the Musicassette format, to customers in France, Germany, Holland, Italy, Scandinavia, the U.K. and the U.S, among others (Billboard, 1967). Over 40 manufacturers were making equipment and cassettes. The Ampex electronics company estimated that 1971 unit sales of playback equipment (includ- ing automotive) would be around 11.6 million units in the United States (Billboard, 1971b). These enormous sales figures, for both equipment and media, leads us to de- fine the end of the ΩY for the ‘microgroove’ (micro) category as 1971, and the era of the ‘cassette’ (cass) as beginning in 1972.

Digital

The 1980s brought a plethora of digital consumer formats, some of which were suc- cessful (e.g. Compact Disc), some which were less so (such as Mini Disc), and some which flopped quite badly (such as Digital Compact Cassette): others were adopted by the recording industry (e.g. DAT, or Digital Audio Tape). The main consumer for- mat, CD, began to outsell vinyl by the late-1980s and continues to be the best selling, physical, recorded music product. Our ‘digital’ era, therefore begins in 1988, when compact disc becomes dominant.

Internet

According to The World Bank1_{, the number of global Internet users exceeded 20% of} the global population in 2007 (which, at the time, meant 1.319 billion users). Ten years earlier the numbers were significantly smaller; in 1997 there were 70 million global users, equating to 1.7% of the population. Nevertheless, in the developed world, a significant proportion of users (21.6% of the population in the USA, 7.4% in the UK, and 9.2% in Japan) were using the Internet. Given these are some of the largest global music markets, and with the impending appearance of Napster (Anderson, 2000), we define the ‘digital’ (dig) era as having an ΩY of 1997, and 1998 as the start of the Inter- net era.

Social Media

By 2007 Facebook was the largest of the new class of ‘social’ media sites, and had acquired 58 million users2 or 4.4% of the total Internet population. By the next year the figure had reached 145 million signifying the arrival of the social media era. The phenomenal growth, that continues, of various social media platforms from this point on, means we define the ‘Internet’ (net) era as ending in 2007, and the Social Media era beginning.

1_{https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.NET.USER.ZS} 2_{http://newsroom.fb.com/company-info}