Francis Fukuyama may have been wrong about the inevitability of global liberal democracy and its implications on future societal developments, but when it comes to playback formats, music lovers may indeed wonder whether we have reached the “end of history.” As I type this, I have just finished losslessly streaming through my phone an album of Beethoven’s wind music conducted by Karl Haas. The notion of being able to stream anything at CD quality would have seemed unthinkable to me even five years ago. But even as up-to-date though such an act may appear, the FLAC file format upon which my streaming service depends upon is nearly two decades old, and is based off of predecessor digital formats whose roots go even further back. Historical progress in musical reproduction has today converged into a static horizon point of possibility.
Even as we are on the cusp of entering the third decade of this current century, the old 20th century’s grip on music appears stronger than ever. The “vinyl renaissance” will immediately come to mind for many, of course, but perhaps the most dramatic illustration of this phenomenon is the nearly forty-year-old compact disc which, for all the disdain and snobbery it incurs from today’s “vinyl” snobs, remains stubbornly alive. Despite posting declines of sales overall, it persists as the top physical music format sold globally. We may eventually find that it will also be the last physical musical format to earn widespread public adoption, the final step in a long evolution that began with the wax cylinder. It’s worthwhile to recall at this moment that forty years into its existence, the LP was on the verge of becoming obsolete. What would the average listener in 1980 say if one had told them that people would still be listening to music in generally the same way in 2020—and with no flying cars, to boot?
All this came to mind earlier today when I took a break from writing to watch a video from Techmoan, one of my favorite YouTube channels. His latest upload deals with the format wars of the late 1940s: Namely, between Columbia’s 33 ⅓ RPM long-playing discs and RCA Victor’s 45 RPM discs. Each sought to succeed the 78 RPM format; both ultimately “won,” although the retelling of this history typically overlooks the crucial role played by classical music.
During this period, classical music was not only an important “prestige” genre, it was also a very financially lucrative market that record labels could not ignore. Even by the 1930s, the 78 RPM was beginning to look (and sound) behind the times, with mostly classical musicians expressing their frustration with its limitations. From its very inception, many of them were skeptical or outright disdainful of a format they felt was plagued by poor quality sound reproduction and short duration. The roster of musicians whose distrust of the then comparatively primitive state of recording technology—a process which Bruno Walter late in life likened to being made to sit in “animal cages”—could not be overcome is a long and painful one.
Because of these limitations, many larger symphonic works or operas were prohibitively expensive to record, or altogether impossible to do so, at least profitably. In 1937, Electrola recorded Act III of Wagner’s Der Meistersinger von Nürnberg with the Staatskapelle Dresden and the Dresden State Opera under Karl Böhm’s direction. Even a single act from the opera took up 15 heavy and fragile double-sided discs. Around the same time, RCA Victor recorded Serge Koussevitzky conducting the Boston Symphony in Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. That recording exceeded 50 discs, if I’m not mistaken. Their cumbersome bulk, not to mention price (a single 78 RPM disc in the 1930s would on average cost the equivalent of approximately US $25 – $30 today) placed such recordings far beyond what all but a very few people and institutions could afford.
It was these problems that spurred a development mentioned in the video: RCA Victor’s failed attempt in 1931 to popularize the Victrolac, its own long-playing format. There are several reasons why they were unable to gain traction at the time, but perhaps among the most important was the growing power of the pop music market. Because while the Victrolac resolved some of the issues posed by the 78 RPM disc, it opened up new ones which alienated the pop music audience
With its comparatively modest demands in length and production, the pop music of the era was as if tailor-made for the 78 RPM format. Understandably, the average fan had no need for expensive multi-disc albums, no concerns about length. Single discs were sufficient to contain the music they desired to hear.
So when RCA Victor (in conjunction with Bell Laboratories) began experimenting, then attempted to market extended playback (and stereophonic sound), it was no surprise that instead of enlisting the pop musicians of the era to push the Victrolac, they instead relied on men like Leopold Stokowski and Sir Thomas Beecham. Even had classical listeners been won over to the Victrolac format and managed to overlook its significant flaws, the prohibitive cost of this new format would have precluded any possibility of winning over fans of pop music, whose support was crucial to make it a viable competitor and successor to the 78 RPM.
This become clearer when fifteen years later Columbia succeeded with its LP, which owed its triumph to two main reasons. Firstly, because the vinyl surface of its playback materials and its duration—with a single album comfortably fitting a standard-length symphony—were an undeniable improvement in fidelity over 78s. Because of that the label could count on the support of their talent roster to court the classical audience, with Igor Stravinsky, Bruno Walter, Eugene Ormandy, and George Szell (who appears on the far right of a group photo with LP pioneer Edward Wallerstein in the aforementioned video) all being prominently featured in their marketing. But secondly, and perhaps more importantly, the LP was affordable. Not only was it significantly cheaper than the Victrolac had been a decade earlier, it promised to eventually be cheaper than the 78 RPM it hoped to replace, thereby making the format accessible to an unprecedentedly broad audience.
At the same time, RCA Victor also succeeded with the 45 RPM precisely because most pop listeners at the time had no use for albums, instead wanting to only hear the latest hit song. It’s telling that pop/jazz musicians wouldn’t really learn to effectively take advantage of the LP format until well into the 1950s. Even deep into the 1960s, many non-classical LP albums were ramshackle things consisting of a hit song or two accompanied by ten or so tracks of filler. Likewise, the possibilities afforded by tape were first explored by the seemingly irreconcilable opposites of the experimental electronic composers and easy-listening orchestras of the 1950s, with rock musicians finally bringing together elements of both in the 1960s.
The classical market, while much diminished after the 1960s, would continue to be an important force in the recording industry as late as the early 1990s. The advent and durability of the CD bears testimony to this fact. Later attempts at physical format improvements—DVD Audio, SACD, Blu-spec, and Blu-ray Audio—have only managed to appeal to a very niche audience, or have simply failed precisely because the classical audience, which tends to prioritize playback duration and fidelity of sound, has itself become an extreme niche in the wider music industry. Many, perhaps most pop music fans today appear to be quite content streaming music at low-quality bit rates. Some pop music today is even mastered on mp3.
If present trends in listening and musical taste continue, it could very well come to be that in forty years from now, the CD, LP, and various successors to today’s present digital formats (if not the present ones themselves) will still be with us. And somehow our dreams of flying cars will, mystifyingly, remain unfulfilled.
