Music as a source of income
The History of Music Recording The first device capable of recording sound was the phonoautograph, patented in 1857. Although this device was an incredible breakthrough in recording technology, it was never intended to make reproducible sounds; only to translate soundwaves into a visible medium for the purpose of studying audiophonics. It wasn't until Thomas Edison invented the phonograph in 1877 that replayable sound recordings became possible, and even then, such recordings were very low-fidelity affairs. It took decades of refinement before high-quality sound recordings became possible. Regardless, it has been less than 200 years since humans devised a way to record sound in any format. For the hundreds of thousands of years prior to that, humans could only listen to music when it was being performed live. But during the last 164 years, attitudes towards music have changed drastically. Until the 1950s, musicians and songwriters were often different people. Notable exceptions to ...