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On the Record: Music before mass production (2018)
On the Record: Music Before Mass Production Despite advances in technology, the fledgling music industry had a problem: it could not mass-produce phonograph records. For a brief period, every recording committed to wax was unique, forcing labels to find creative ways of meeting demand.
The Perfected model, louder than its predecessor and recording on to wax cylinders instead of the original tinfoil, soon appeared in social clubs, inns, hotels, funfairs, theatres and other public spaces throughout the 1890s. Reproducibility also inspired some of the earlier critiques of the recording industry by prominent left-wing thinkers such as Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno, concerned with the industrialisation of an increasingly uniform cultural landscape as it moved into the mid-20th century. Another gabinete owner from early 20th-century Madrid, Álvaro Ureña – a former soldier who left the army to experiment with electricity and then with recording technologies – sent a letter to several local newspapers in February 1900 criticising his competitors who produced multiple copies of the same cylinder by having singers perform in front of more than one device.
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