Earlier this week, the Oxford University Press blog had a remembrance of the first release of a significant milestone in the development of media formats – the “LP” or Long Playing record, which was invented by Peter Goldmark.
The OUP blog post has an extensive quote from the American National Biography Online (a subscription based publication of the Oxford University Press), a smaller excerpt of which is below:
After the [Second World] war Goldmark began developing the long-playing (LP) record. An accomplished cello and piano player, he loved listening to classical music on the phonograph but hated having to change the record every few minutes. By slowing a record’s revolutions per minute from 78 to 33-1/3, multiplying the number of grooves, and using vinyl instead of shellac as the pressing medium, he lengthened its playing time to about twenty minutes per side, long enough to hold an entire classical movement, while greatly improving the quality of the sound. Unveiled in 1948, the LP revolutionized the recorded-music industry and helped CBS to become a giant in the record business.
It is interesting to speculate about the very different regimes of cultural media distribution and consumption that existed in the immediate post-WWII era vs. today. Obviously LP albums were much less portable than the CDs that followed; nevertheless, music saw its fair share of “piracy” – putting that term in quotes because the cassette taping and sharing of LPs among friends was not routinely cast in the same terminology as the comparable practice today by the owners and marketers of the intellectual property. While there was marketing towards the concern, it was always more of a conversation, and less a threat.
As far as I know, there was no effort, even given the limitations of the media, to restrict its use in any way; e.g., no one imprinted physical “region codes” onto the disks so that only record players associated with a certain region could work with them; despite the analog restrictions, conceivably something along these lines could have been introduced if the engineering effort had been perceived to be warranted.
Clearly, in the eyes of media companies, consumers are much more dangerous to the health of content industries now than they were then.