Playback and payback series; (part 13) Control issues: did home taping kill music?

“It’s a great scam if you think about it,” wrote David Shamah, an economics reporter for the Jerusalem Post.

“You bought, say, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road by Elton John when it came out in 1973 (am I dating myself?) and you still like it. You even still have the album, although the record player is long gone and they don’t make them anymore [actually, they do, but you have to look hard to find them]. You like the album so much you bought a cassette tape version to play in the car and later on a CD. Now you’ve got an iPod or similar MP3 player and you’re considering buying the MP3 version. Hmmm. Shelling out four times for the same product?“

From the time that Edison, Bell and Berliner introduced recorded music as a consumable product until about the mid-1970s, the record business was in control. You wanted to own the music, you had to go through it. That started to change, very slowly, around the end of World War II, with the advent of tape recording.

The tape machine came to America from Germany with a Colonel Richard Ranger, who dismantled it, figured out how it worked, put it back together, and arranged for people to see it. “He showed it to me and Bing Crosby and [Hollywood sound engineer] Glen Glenn,” recording pioneer (and inventor of the solid body electric guitar) Les Paul said. “He showed me the advantage of tape over disc and it immediately turned my head.”

While the reel-to-reel tape machine became one of the music business’s best friends, ushering in the complex multitrack recording studio – another Les Paul invention – very few of the machine’s private owners were ever accused of trying to kill the music, though many committed music to their reels. Most of the owners of reel-to-reel tape machines tended to be either affluent adults, younger music makers, or students recording lectures.

They were few and far enough between that the music industry didn’t pay much attention to reel-to-reel recorders. The panic didn’t even start when Phillips introduced the cassette deck in 1963. While far easier to use than the reel-to-reel tapes, which often required Byzantine threading, the cassette couldn’t get rid of the sonic hiss inherent in its design. Like the early Edison phonograph, it mostly found its way into offices as a dictation medium.

Then Ray Dolby’s labs introduced a consumer noise-reduction system that got built into cassette decks starting in the mid-1970s. Now a cassette could make a serviceable copy of an album, and FM radio started to feed the frenzy with Midnight album blocks, during which they would play a new album all the way through for the home-taping pleasure of their audience. By the early 1980s, the U.K. record industry trade group, the British Phonographic Industry, had become so alarmed that it created this logo: