Both phonographs and records were sold in furniture stores, especially after the Victrola proved a phonograph could also be a pretty piece of furniture. Piano and musical instrument stores, which were far more numerous back then than they are today, also sold them, and some of these also began their own labels (such as the Starr and Gennett jazz labels which grew out of the Starr Piano company.)
Victor sold only flat discs, Edison only cylinders, and Colombia sold both formats. By the early 1800s, all three companies had divisions in Britain, Germany, France and elsewhere.
Apparently the first Victor record to have the famous picture of the dog listening to “His Master’s Voice” on the label was Caruso’s first Red Seal record. The Victor Red Seal imprint, and the signing of opera star Enrico Caruso, were major turning points in making both the public and performers view records as valid cultural items as opposed to crude novelty items. This parallels turning points in other media, such as D.W. Griffith proving films could tell serious stories (and be more than 15 minutes long) with his Birth of a Nation in 1915.
The Victor Red Seals were premium records, selling for $1 each in 1903 (with music on only one side! Often, elaborate designs were stamped into the other side.) By 1942, they sometimes retailed for $7, equivalent to who knows how much today! Still, they were THE gold standard for lovers of “serious” music, and more than 130 million were sold between 1903 and 1942.
Another watershed moment in the young record industry occurred in 1904, when Victor began pressing songs onto both sides of a disc for the first time (and raising the price accordingly.) The French scientist Ademor Petit discovered that molten shellac spread more evenly if it was squeezed by record stampers on both sides simultaneously (instead of being stamped into a flat mold. Victor quickly patented the idea everywhere it could, and Colombia immediately challenged the patent. A few years followed with both parties in the courts, culminating in 1908, when the lawyer for Colombia dramatically held up a record in the courtroom and demanded to know that “If we are to be restricted to one side of the record, which side shall it be?” From then on, the concept of the two-sided flat record has remained in the public domain.
In 1917, Jazz (or at first, Jass—some say the spelling was changed because Jass sounded too much like Ass) became the first new kind of music to originate on records. (The earlier ragtime and tin-pan alley styles had instead first been popularized in music halls and through sheet music and piano rolls.)
The first jazz band to strike it big on record was the Original Dixieland Jass Band—an all-white band playing music invented by the black musicians of New Orleans. Some would say that as with Elvis and rock and roll, the majors waited until a white-only jazz band came along before marketing the new music, but most histories make it seem more like a coincidence than a devious plan. According to legend, jazz great Freddie Keppard was offered a record deal by Victor shortly before the first ODJB records, but he turned it down because he worried that other musicians would play the records over and over and learn all of his playing tricks. (Early jazz was far less improvised and very complicated musically, leading some musicians to even turn their backs to the audience during their fancier solo parts.) Another version of this story says that Keppard actually was holding out for more money from Victor, demanding to know how much Caruso was being paid, and that Victor eventually lost patience. Either way, once the ODJB hit it big, demand for the new style was such that most jazz musicians (regardless of colour) got to put out records if they wanted to.

THE RADIO THREAT

In 1920, commercial radio began and even by 1921, it had an effect on record and phonograph sales. The record industry did get a boost in late 1921, though, when Victor’s patents on flat records were defeated in court, and immediately many independent record companies began making records. In the end, this only helped Victor because the greater variety of music the new record labels made available to listeners spurred the sale of phonographs, of which Victor’s were by far the most popular. (To this day, you can get a perfectly functional portable Victor from the 1920s for about $150. They were really built to last!)
When commercial radio began in 1920, the sound reception was mostly fuzzy and not very good. It improved a lot over the next few years, however, and record companies were furious about this business of people getting music piped into their homes for free. Many listeners, though, believed radios would quickly make phonographs and the whole record industry obsolete. Why pay 50 cents or $1 (equivalent to at least $10 - $20 today) per song when you can get non-stop music for free? Also, with radio, you didn’t have to get up after each song to change the side, not to mention crank up the phonograph for each song. Plus, music on the radio never wore out—there were no scratches or ticks as there were on your old records. And by 1924 or so, the sound quality of most radios was better than that of most phonographs.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6