Millard, Andre. America on Record:  A History of Recorded Sound. 2 ed. Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Andre Millard has three goals in this book:  To give a history of the technology of recorded sound, to discuss the social impact of recorded sound, and to discuss the economic impact and development of the business of recorded sound in terms of the history of American Business.

This book resonates with the ideas of Thomas F. Hughes, in American Genesis that the history of America is not a history of business, but a history of invention.  Millard wants to show that recorded sound is an American invention.  He says that, “[although] Europe provided much of the music, America provided the machines,” that kept that music as a cultural and historical resource.  The invention and innovation in recorded sound technology before and after WWII happened primarily in the United States.  After WWII, Millard says, much of the musical innovation also came from the United States, and the combination of content and machinery went far in disseminating American language, culture, and ideas.  So he says, the history of recorded sound is also a kind of globalized history of America – “America on Record.”  This is one source, then, of both the cultural imperialism and global outlook of the United States.

But, the importance of the United States in the history of recorded sound aside, what importance does recorded sound have in history?  Millard notes that the inventors of recorded sound, including Edison, had grand visions that included the possibility of recording important politicians, literary figures, and historical decision-making.  The technology has been used for those purposes, and sound recording can be more immediate in terms of recalling to us the past than written documents or even images can be, because voices can convey emotions, and background sounds give a context for events, etc.  Millard brings up recordings of the explosion of the Hindenburg for example.  But the problem here is that there is no continuous, and few unedited, recordings of this type exist.  Certainly not enough to provide a continuous historical record.  Music, however, because of its market appeal, cultural immediacy, and sentimental effects, does exist and can be used as historical references.

Millard then begins the history of recorded sound with the invention of the phonograph by Edison – the invention, he says, that provided Edison with his famous nickname The Wizard of Menlo Park.  Millard organizes America on Record beginning here and based on the eras of technological development he has identified.  The stages he gives start with the “acoustic era”,–defined by sound recording done without the assistance of electricity on mechanical phongraphs, the apex of which was the 78 RPM shellac disc, between 1877 and the 1920’s.  The acoustic era gave way in the 1920’s to the “electrical era” which hit its high point with the record player and transistor technology, and microgroove vinyl discs in the 1960’s.  The 1970’s saw the era of magnetic tape, which overtook records in sales in 1977, but was mostly replaced by digital technology as represented by the Compact Disc beginning in 1982.   Finally, Millard deals with the apex of digital technology as represented by MP3 players and advanced recording technology that became available in the Twenty-first Century.  In all, Millard wants to demonstrate that the short history of sound recording technology – a little over a century – has seen a great number of changes as, he says, technological improvements have overtaken each other in a stunning series of success-failure waves.

Edison’s invention of sound recording technology, Millard says, did not happen in a vacuum, but can be contextualized with other inventions of the Nineteenth Century that were a part of a communications revolution.  By the time Edison had invented the acoustic phonograph, all the recording technologies of the twentieth century had already gotten their starts – the telephone and the vacuum-sealed electric light provided the basis for electronic recording, and recording wire was already the foundation of taperecording technology.  The simplicity and efficiency of the phonograph was simply the most accessible and complete of the three technologies in the late nineteenth century.   All three would continue development throughout the next hundred years.

In America on Record, though, Millard is also interested in the way in which this recording technology, which he says Edison invented for what he calls “democratic purposes” – to bring music that in 1876 could only be heard in live performances that could only regularly be attended by the wealthy – into the homes and lives of common people.  Edison, he says, wanted to democratize music and sound – to bring sound to silent spaces in our world.  The degree of “democratization” was impossible to predict, however.  Discussing World War I, Millard shows the discovery that music made soldiers more effective by boosting their morale, then explains how workers in factories and offices were able to boost their productivity as well with the simple addition of music.  This added recorded sound to nearly every public and private space in the United States.  The subsequent narrowing of musical choice – corporations and factories chose music that had specific qualities that prevented melancholy but did not promote misbehavior, for example, also narrowed the range of music and the quality of music that people were exposed to in such places.  Recording and marketing of music also enforced a categorization system on music, setting musical genres within prescribed limits that were more useful for marketing than for producing and consuming art.  The effect of this technology, and of the dizzying speed with which it has changed, however, is the creation of what can only be described as a cacaphony in which there is much to be found that is good, but much that is little more than noise.  Recorded telephone messages, advertisements, white noise, and so-called “elevator music” described above meet us at every stage of the day and night.  We are inundated with sound.  Even Edison, Millard claims, might have been disappointed with the way sound recording technology has made our world a noisy, restless place.

Finally, Millard wants to show that the development of sound recording technology has followed a familiar American business pattern.  He shows that it has moved from small shops and low tech, from a wide base of small producers – an open market in which new participants can, relatively easily and cheaply, enter and succeed, to a closed market business oligopoly controlled by only a few very large firms with multidivisional structures organized as global conglomerates, whose business power gives them the ability to shape and direct what sounds are available for listening, and in many ways to control the market.  Millard argues that this change in the record industry is to a great extent a result of business and economic realities that faced all American businesses in the twentieth century.  Edison’s invention and manufacture of the phonograph, for example, was the opening round in an early Twentieth Century race to take advantage of the new invention, and entrepreneurs tried it in nearly any way it might conceivably be useful – as a dictation machine, a system for communicating messages, a telephone answering machine, and many more.  Most of these firms failed, but the application of recording technology to music seems to have been the biggest success, and phonographs, then record players, became primarily consumer goods.  Their newness meant that sales grew rapidly before WWI, and during the war, sales skyrocketed as uses for them in improving the morale of soldiers and the productivity of workers added to the market for the machines and the music.  The Great Depression, though, according to Millard, caused massive business failures in the music industry, leaving only a few giants standing, ready for the advent of new electronic technologies, including the jukebox, and a new marketing model in which prerecorded discs were used to provide programming content for the faster growing radio market.  The use of prerecorded discs reduced production costs, and made possible the founding of increasing numbers of radio stations, which no longer had to rely on house orchestras and live productions, and could also provide nation-wide advertising produced cheaply in a central location.  This kind of centralized distribution network, made production of recorded music less expensive, and increased the market both for the technology and the content, leading to a solid business model for the firms still standing after the Great Depression.  The change to large, multi-divisional corporate structures, though, combined with concerns after WWII that record sales might again lag led to conservative business practices and little innovation, until the need to continue to expand the market and technical innovations such as the use of vinyl resins to make better quality discs which could record more music. – in other words, a more productive process of manufacture and distribution, this time because of more efficient packaging of content.

Millard goes on to describe the power of movies and television to promote music, and the “Rock and Roll Revolution” which increased markets even while it leveled the economic and particularly the racial playing field for consumers of recorded sound products.  The key shift in the last half of the book that Millard wants to demonstrate, though, is the shift, noted above, from multiple and varied producers and products to centralized production and corporate dominance, but then back again, in the digital era, particularly with MP3 and computer music systems, to personal/private production and distribution of music and recorded products in a way that is less expensive and more effective than the centralized corporations.  This new ability to compete in virtual reality with corporate dominance will transform music and distribution again in the future.