Media and You: From Records to Film

something a little different from my normal episode. So rather than tackle a particular technology or tell you about the history of a tech company, or even go into an in depth profile of an innovator, I thought instead I would talk about a more broad topic that kind of delves not just into technology, but into business and into culture.

So it's all about our relationship with media. Specifically, I'm going to be focusing on stuff like audio and video and how our relationship with that sort of media has changed as technology has changed over the years. Those changes have been pushed by innovation and also the entertainment industry's reaction to innovation and spoiler alert, sometimes the entertainment industry's

reaction was resistance. So I think the story also tells us a lot about ourselves, not just the stuff we enjoy, but it tells us more about what we value and where we can find that balance between art and commerce, which is a pretty tricky topic. So today we're going to look at how tech has changed the way we access entertainment. And because this is a large topic, it's going to take a few episodes. So we're going to focus on the early days of modern media in this episode.

So we're gonna actually first start because you know how I am a couple of centuries ago, before the Industrial Revolution and the age of electricity. So first, most people didn't have a whole lot of time to spare for entertainment. If you were working class, you spend most of your waking hours doing work, and even those more elevated in social class had limited options for their entertainment. Let's say

that you were one of those fortunate individuals. You're born into wealth and social status, so you could go to where entertainment was happening, such as a theater or an opera house if you're talking about say seventeenth century or later. Um, but maybe you go to a tavern, to go into a sort of public houses courtyard that's where sometimes various

entertainments would be performed. Perhaps you could attend a party thrown by some fancy person who has decided to host entertainers for an evening, or maybe you bring the entertainment to you, you host your own fancy party. Perhaps you have a string quartet in your palatial estate. Now obviously that option is limited to a pretty select group of people. Or you could take it upon yourself to learn some form of entertainment, such as learning to play one or

more instruments. But entertainment was ephemeral. It was momentary. You enjoyed it as it was happening, and then it was over. You had no way to experience it again without reinitiating the performance itself. And then of course you're going to get a variation on what you've just experienced, since it's pretty rare that humans can perfectly replicate a performance. So being a professional entertainer was a challenging gig in those days too, because there was there was no way to

live off of recordings. You could conceivably publish sheet music for your works, but that was challenging too. It was an industry that was rife with piracy. Because music and entertainment piracy is not a new thing that has been around since the printing press essentially, So take the famous playwright William Shakespeare. He wrote in the late fifteen hundreds and early sixteen hundreds. He never published any of his

plays during his own lifetime. Other people sometimes published his plays, and there were many versions of his plays that were printed in what we're called quartos. No need to go into why, that's more of a history thing. But these

quartos were sometimes based off of partial theatrical scripts. They might be based off old drafts that were pieced together from previous performances, or they might even have been cobbled together from memory, either by working with an actor or someone who had attended a performance and then is essentially trying to recreate it as best they can. So they're frequently referred to by scholars as being unreliable or bad quartos.

It wasn't until several years after Shakespeare had died that an official version of his plays reached publication, so this was not a common thing. In fact, it wouldn't be until really Ben Johnson was demanding his plays get published

a little bit later. So if you were a performer back in the old days, you either sought out a patron who would put the bill for your expenses, or you would travel around and get hired to play for an engagement, or maybe you'd be part of an ensemble with an established theater and depend upon a share of the box office if you were part time owner of that or a part owner of that theatrical company. But

that was about it. Gutenberg's printing press allowed for the rise of the publishing industry, so if you were a composer, you could land a publishing deal and make a little bit of money there, although the publishing houses were making most of the money. And that's pretty much how things went until the late nineteenth century, and that's when tons

of changes happened. The Industrial Revolution was underway and had actually really mostly happened by the late nineteenth century, and suddenly people had a lot more spare time on their hands. They could actually dedicate time to recreation and relaxation and entertainment. It's also when Thomas Edison and others were changing the world by introducing devices uh that could do lots of different things. You were getting electric light, electricity in general.

The birth of radio was right around the corner, and the birth of the ability to record and playback audio. Now, it's not like the record industry immediately popped up after Edison demonstrated this capability. It took many years to refine the technology to a point where recording was of a high enough quality to serve as a commercial product, and it also took time to develop a better playback device, something like the gramophones that you could actually hear the

recording and a decent volume. The gramophone introduced another innovation that helped create the recording industry, which was the flat disc. So earlier recordings were made on wax cylinders. The cylinders had several disadvantages. One was that they weren't easy to mass produce, so you were had limited runs when you

were making these things in the first place. And early on, you might make a recording by shouting into the wide end of a speaking trumpet, and that would send vibrations down the trumpet to a diaphragm in the narrow end that had a stylus attached to it, essentially, and the vibration would make the stylus carve out a groove in a rotating wax cylinder that was moving vertically against well rotating and moving vertically against the stylus, so from top

to bottom you would have one long spiral, and the variations of indentation would be the representation of sound but this was not a terribly efficient way to make recordings. Edison vound ways to improve the system, but it was still hard to make a lot of cylinders at once. It just wasn't the right format. On top of that, wax cylinders were fairly bulky. You couldn't store a ton of them on a shelf, for example, and they weren't

very durable. After a couple of dozen playbacks, the quality on the recording would degrade to the point where it could be unintelligible. And also they couldn't hold very much recorded audio in the first place. They were limited just a few minutes. So a guy named Emil Berliner came up with the flat disc. If you listen to my episode about the history of the turntable, I talked about Berliner.

I also will be repeating some of the information from that episode, but it's important to establish it to understand our relationship with media. So to make a recording on a flat disc originally anyway, he would take a master disc made out of metal and he would code it with lamp black, which is sort of like dipping the disc in ink while recording. There'd be a stylus that would drag against this disk in a spiral from the

outside edge to the inside edge of this disc. So if you've ever seen a record album, vinyl record album, that's how the grooves go from the outside and they work their way in same sort of thing. Now, while it was recording, this stylus would make little lateral oscillations, meaning it would shake side to side a little bit as the sound was impacting the diaphragm attached to the stylus. This is an opposition to wax cylinders those relied on

vertical oscillations. The essentially think of the stylus as going in or out of the wax, so it's digging deeper or it's not digging as deeply as the sound is hitting it. This version, the the disc version was going left right, not up and down, So the stylus would essentially wipe away a little bit of the lamp black. So at the end of the recording you would have this disc that's mostly black, but you would have a spiral of metal showing through the black surface where the

stylus had had scraped off the lamp black. Essentially, then Berliner would take this disc and dip it into an acid bath, and that would eat away at the exposed metal, leaving the lamp blacked metal untouched. You're lifted out of that acid bath, you wipe it down, and you have

essentially a master recording. Berliner then could use a process called electroplating to create a negative image of this master, the negative image meaning that the copy of it would have the groove turned into a raised ridge on the negative. So what was a a indented groove on the master is now a raised ridge that would actually be used as a stamp, and you could stamp blank discs with this master or this master stamp, and thus transfer the

master recording two copies. And that meant that Berliner's approach was better suited for mass production. It gave it a big advantage over wax cylinders. A bit later, innovators combined Berliner's mass production method with the practice of recording on wax, because recording on wax was easier and created a better

quality recording than Berliner's approach with the lampblack uh. This was a method that Alexander Graham Bell and Charles Tainter had developed, and so that was on wax cylinders back in the day. Now they're transferring it over to wax discs, and the result was a mass producible recording method that was able to produce good enough sound quality to allow

for amercial application of the technology. So at the turn of the twentieth century, so right around nineteen the companies making the playback devices, namely the Gramophone and Typewriter Company, began to sell home grammophones with the help of recordings of famous musicians and singers. The allure was really strong because not everyone had the means or opportunity to hear someone like Enrico Caruso sing, but with a gramophone and a record, you could reproduce him singing in your own home.

Some of those early recordings were so popular that they would have to be re recorded because the master recording would wear out. The master stamp would wear out after a certain number of pressings, so that also led to the industry developing a new method in order to create

multiple stamps from a single master recording. That way, when one wore out, they would still have another backup master stamp to go with, and they wouldn't have to worry about having to rerecord or the whole thing, because it would just mean that you have two different recordings of the same piece, and one might actually be better than the other, and maybe that the first recording was better or maybe the second one, but either way they wouldn't

be exactly the same. Now this time around, you started seeing recording companies emerge. Victor and Colombia were big ones, and from the turn of the century until about nineteen five, all recordings were made by playing or singing or speaking into that wide end of a trumpet, a physical trumpet. This was the mechanical approach to recording. This was before the electric microphone was used in recording sessions, and there

were engineering challenges that made this pretty tough. If you were really close to the horn, creating what was known as a forward recording, then your performance would sound more vivid and dynamic. You're you're closer to that diaphragm that's actually transferring the vibration through the stylus to the recording media, usually a wax disc. But the nature of those vibrations recorded on the disc meant that the discs you'd produce later would tend to wear out faster. They were deeper cuts.

They were using a material called shellac at the time, which was hard and brittle, and fairly thin um, and so those deeper recordings would mean that if you were to play this playing it back on a turntable, each time you've laid it back, it was adding more wear and tear to the disc, and so those discs wouldn't last as long. The sound quality would be better, but

they wouldn't last very long compared to other discs. So if you recorded further away from the horn, you would have a more muted sound, but it would also mean that those grooves weren't quite so extreme, so the produced discs would actually last longer. So it's something you had to balance out. Uh. The technologies limitations also dictated the type of content that could go on them, and thus it shaped the development of music itself. Early recordings had

to be short. Early wax cylinders and discs had a capacity to hold just a couple of minutes of a recording. Engineers worked on refining the recording technology and the capacity slowly increased, but it was still hovering it around five minutes per disc or cylinder in the nineteen twenties. Rarely, sound engineers would work with musicians to play a piece faster than the normal arrangement, just so it would fit on a side of a recording, so you might hear

about that. It didn't happen as frequently as some people tend to talk about, but it was something that occasionally happened where maybe you had a piece that would last typically five minutes fifteen seconds, but you're limited to four minutes forty five seconds per side of a recording, so rather than try and split it up, you just speed up the tempo and play it faster than you normally would.

That did happen occasionally, but other times they might work with a composer or a musician to tweak a recording, to to tweak the the arrangement of the music so that they could create a transition in such a way that there would be a natural pause that would allow you to turn a disc over or to put on a second or third, or fourth or whatever disc on the playback device. So here we have our first really interesting example of how technology truly changed music, and not

just by increasing its accessibility. The recorded media format dictated the form. If you were to compose a piece specifically to record it, you know, you're not just putting something that already exists to a recording, but you're writing to the format, you would have to work within the limitations of the medium. You couldn't have a piece be too soft in volume because it wouldn't be loud enough to transfer the vibrations to the recording horns stylist, so you

couldn't also be meat loaf. You couldn't write a fourteen minute epic ballad because the physical space on the red warding blanks wasn't enough to fit that many grooves onto a side. These limitations would carry on even as technology improved, and it's largely why most popular songs these days averaging at around three minutes in length. It's not because that's about as long as people want to listen to a song.

It's because back in the old days, three minutes was about what you had to work with, give or take. Longer pieces required several discs to make a complete recording, and it wasn't unusual for a single long piece to spend nine or more disks on one piece of music, not multiple songs. But you think of some of those classical pieces, like a symphony that can go on for quite a while. You might have nine, ten eleven disks

representing one symphony. The industry standard recording in playback speed was for the disk to spend at seventy eight revolutions per minute or seventy eight rpm, and that started at around five as the industry standard. This actually wasn't anything necessarily to do with sound quality or anything like that.

It was literally a convenience because there was a plentiful number of thirty six hundred rpm motors that you could get your hands on if you wanted to build a U turntable, and then you would use a forty six tooth gear to scale down that revolutions per minute and you would end up giving getting so many eight revolutions per minute. So typically you would store all the discs from a single recording in a folder with pockets for every disk, and those folders were called albums. Look kind

of like a photo album. You would have a disc album that represented one full recording of whatever piece it was, and that's why we call them albums. Now, after the First World War, radio began to emerge, and that offered up an alternative to owning a gramophone at home. Instead of buying a gramophone and records, you could purchase a radio and listen to stations. Some of the stations would

also play recordings. You wouldn't be able to listen to what you wanted when you wanted, but you'd also have the potential to access a much larger library of recordings, or, depending upon the station, you could be listening to live performances. In fact, a lot of radio stations depended more on live performances than recordings because radio, unlike the recording industry at the time, was reliant on electric electric microphones, so those were much better at picking up a dynamic range

of sounds. They could pick up quiet stuff, they could pick up a loud stuff. They were much more versatile for recording sessions. You didn't have to be right up on the horn. They're amazing photos of of uh, small orchestras or bands all just crowded around the horn of a recording device in order to play their music into it. And you always had to put the quieter instruments up towards the front or else they'd be overpowered by the louder instruments. There wasn't as big a concern with that

with electric microphones. They were much better at picking up those dynamic ranges, so you didn't have to worry about having everybody right up ons that that horn. So radio performances tended to be superior to recorded music on disk, and you started to see more people kind of gravitate towards the radio than the recorded media. So this was another shift the way that technology was changing our behavior, and the recording industry started to experiment with using electric

microphones as well. They saw the need to respond to this new threat of radio. All right, now, when we come back, i'll talk about how some improvements in recording technology got the industry back in the game and changed how we think about media. But first, let's take a quick break. In the nineteen twenties, a pair of engineers from Bell Telephone Laboratories would revolutionize sound recording. They were JP. Max Field and HC. Harrison, and they had already applied

their ingenuity to making telephones a viable technology. They subjected the process of sound recording and replication to scientific study for the first time. In August ninety six, they published the results of their work in a paper titled High Quality Recording and Reproducing of Music and Speech, which you can find online. If you are so inclined, you could read the whole thing. It's not a very long paper either.

Max Field and Harrison demonstrated that using electronic means of recording would produce higher quality results than the mechanical acoustic method that had been in use. Microphones for orchestras could be placed a bit further away from the musicians, so again they didn't have to be crowded around the horn, and microphones can capture the sound quality of the room where the recording is made, and that generated what the two engineers would refer to as room tone, which is

still a thing. In fact, we actually try to remove room tone from our recording so that you get a cleaner sound. But it was thought of as a valuable thing. It it gave another quality to music, and so it was something that was considered an interesting thing to capture at the time. Interestingly, in that paper, Maxfield and Harrison argue that for playback devices, particularly for home playback devices, a mechanical system might be preferable to one using electricity

for sound reproduction. So recording sound you want to use an electric microphone, but playing it back they didn't think it was that important. So with the mechanical system, you have the stylist that vibrates as it travels through the grooves of a disk, and those vibrations transferred to a diaphragm, which in turn vibrates and changes the air pressure inside a horn, and then we hear those fluctuations of air

pressure as sound. But that's a direct path. The alternative is to have the stylus transfer those vibrations to a device that can transform the physical vibrations into electrical impulses, send those impulses to an amplification system to boost the very weak signal that the stylus generates, and use that boosted signal to drive some other element to vibrate, essentially a speaker, and to create the sound we'd hear. Now, due to the limitations of technology at the time, that

really wasn't a viable approach for home electronics. It wouldn't be till later, when speakers and amplifiers were more available that that would become viable. The paper led to a new method of recording called the Western Electric Recording System or West TREKS, and the results were pretty fantastic for the time. Suddenly a recorded piece of music or spoken word could stand up to the quality herd over live radio performances. Recording companies like Victor and Columbia quickly adopted

the new methodology. But these recording companies were not eager to stick with the Western Electric system for a couple of big reasons. One was that the recording companies weren't allowed to purchase a recording system outright. Western Electric would only lease the systems, so that was an ongoing cost. Secondly, Western Electric demanded a royalty fee for every record sold

that had been made through the Western Electric process. And let me tell you something, folks, nothing drives innovation more than money does. Genius has its place, but money makes the world go round, and companies often find great incentive to innovate when it could mean keeping more of the cash for the company itself. So the recording companies were all at work trying to create alternatives to the Western Electric system to get the same results, but through a

different approach. They had to be careful that their own methodologies were distinct from Western Electric in order to avoid infringing upon patents, and so alternate methods began to emerge, and these in turn created recordings with slightly different qualities to them, so you could, in theory, record the exact same performance using two different systems and produced two different master recordings of that same performance, But the way the

recorded music would sound when played back would be slightly different from one to the other, not so different that you would think you were listening to two separate recording sessions, but the tone of the recordings could be different. And

so technology again was having an effect on music. Now, this also touches on something that will pop up again in these episodes, which is the quest for fidelity, and by that I mean the effort to create a playback of a recorded moment that strives to replicate the original performance as closely as possible. In an ideal recording system, the recorded media would sound exactly the way it sounded

in the recording studio. So if you were in that room listening to the musicians play a song live, and then you listen to the recorded version, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference. Ideally. Now, there are plenty of instances in which those making the recording they don't want a perfect reproduction. There are lots of effects you might want to put on audio before you commit it to a master recording, like overdubbing or auto tune or

what ever. But that wasn't a big thing in the nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties, so we're going to ignore that for now. So let's switch gears a bit. We're gonna come back to the music industry before the end of this episode. But while the music industry was building its foundation, the same thing was happening in the film industry.

The birth of that industry was also in the nineteenth century, as innovators discovered that by presenting a sequence of similar images to the eye and rapid succession, you could simulate a moving image. Actually it dates back to before that, but they're serious study put to it in the eighteenth century or nineteenth century rather, so that's the basis of film and animation. You aren't really watching motion. You're watching a bunch of still images, like photographs or drawings that

are put in rapid sequence in front of us. So our brains, just like technology, are limited. There is a threshold for the speed at which we can view separate images and see them as being distinct. In the nineteenth century, scientists hypothesized that it was the retina that could only distinguish different ages if there was a long enough delay between them, and so the name for the phenomena was the persistence of vision. But in fact this limitation is

really in our brains, not our eyes themselves. If you present images faster than the threshold can account for, you get the illusion of movement. Twenty four frames a second is a good example. At twenty four frames per second, our brains cannot distinguish the the individual images and we see that as motion. So, just like with the recording industry,

the early years of film were ones of experimentation. In the eighteen eighties, George Eastman created a process that would allow a camera to take a series of photographs in quick succession, thus recording movement. A very short clip it's less than two seconds long. Uh it comes from eight shows a record of what this process could produce, and it's called the round Hey Garden scene. It was created by Louis la Prince and all it shows is people

walking around in a garden. It's a far cry from a feature film, but it was a building block for what would follow. In the early eighteen nineties, a French inventor named Leon Bouley created a device called the cinematic graph, but Bully was never able to produce a physical prototype and so he sold his idea to two brothers, Auguste and Louis Lumier. The Lumiers took his idea and they created a new device. They made a lot of changes. In fact, it was really more their invention than Boulets

at the end, but it used the same name cinematograph. Uh. It was not just a camera that could capture images, it was also a projector that could display those captured images against a flat surface. In fact, you could process the film too. You could do all three in this one device. It's was really revolutionary. So earlier devices could capture images on film, but they weren't projectors. So instead you would use this device that was kind of like

a had a visor I piece. You would actually look into the visor and typically you would turn a crank as well, though some of them had mors and it would play back the frames and you would watch it playback in real time, but limited the audience to just one person at a time. The Lumier brothers created a technology that allowed for group presentations, which in turn set the stage for the theatrical film experience, and their contribution was significant enough that cinema became a word we would

use to describe the art and industry of filmmaking. Their version was a hand cranked device. It actually made it much more portable. You didn't have to have big wires or anything to provide electricity to it. But it also depended upon the camera and projector operator having a steady hand, otherwise motion would be herky jerky. As the recording or playback speed varied, so there were electronic versions or or electric motor versions out there. Edison had already created one,

but again, it wasn't a projector. Also, I'm skipping over a ton of interesting historical facts about projectors in general, but just know they were a critical component of cinema now. The Lumiers held a special screening in eight They charged people one franc to view ten short films. The total running time for all ten films together was about twenty

five minutes. So the Lumiers combined several things that would become important parts of cinema moving forward, the capturing of images in short succession, projecting them back on a large surface,

and charging money to watch the result. They weren't the first to do any of those things individually, but combining them in this way meant that Their screening is frequently used as sort of the birthday for modern cinema, but the brothers didn't think this curiosity would stand the test of time, with Louis even proclaiming that the practice didn't

have a future. George Millier, who made films in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, used the futureless art to do more than capture scenes of real life that the Lumiers were just sort of capturing stuff that was happening in front of them. Millier had the idea of using this to create stories. He wanted to build narratives with plot. He would edit and cut films. That was a practice that was truly innovative and would become another

integral component of filmmaking. Edwin s Porter, who had worked for Edison, created a twelve minute narrative film called The Great Train Robbery in nineteen o three, and films were starting to get longer and longer, with what is considered to be the first feature length film debuting in nineteen o six that would Charles Tate's film The Ned Kelly Gang, had a running time of seventy minutes. The following decades saw various filmmakers introduced new techniques to push the art form.

At the same time, engineers were working to improve camera and projector technologies. Gradually, the hand cranked era gave way to electric motors and projectors that could record in playback film at a set speed, so you didn't have to

worry about herkey jerky motion anymore. One of the big engineering challenges the industry faced was how to put sound to film, and there were a couple of different methods, but one of those methods was called vitaphone, and vitaphone would rely upon a projector sync nized with a phonograph player, upon which a disk with the film's soundtrack would play in synchronization with the playback of the film, which ties

together cinema with the recording industry. The big difference here was that while you could have a phonograph in your home and listen to your own records, there was no way as of yet to enjoy a film in your own home. I've got a lot more to say about media, but let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. Like the recording industry, the film industry gave birth to

new production studios. Early movies were usually produced by engineers and innovators, so sort of independence who were just trying out this new technology. These geniuses created that technology, but they weren't necessarily as a dept at building compelling stories. Meanwhile, the storytellers out there weren't necessarily in a position to get hold of cameras and actors and sets and crew to put a movie to get other and so enterprising

individuals began to form studios for that very purpose. The oldest one in the United States is Universal, which was founded in nineteen twelve. Paramount would follow later that year, but it was originally called the Famous Players Film Company. Films had to have a place to play as well. It wasn't just enough to make them, you had to have a place to show them. And that's where theaters

come in. Now. Some theaters were independent operations, and those independent operations would negotiate with different movie studios for the rights to show different films. Such an independent theater could at least in theory, show a Paramount film one week and a Universal Pictures film the following week. But many theaters were outright owned by the studios themselves, and they would typically only screen films made by the parents studio.

In addition, studios were buying up film processing companies, which brought the entire process of moviemaking from shooting to processing to screening under one company. An so, if you want to see a movie back in the early twentieth century, you were probably headed to a specific theater owned by the studio then made the film you wanted to see. And it was a great situation for the movie studios

and not so great for just about everyone else. Filmmakers and actors would have to sign exclusive contracts to specific studios, which might guarantee a number of movies or pictures as they call them in the biz, but would prevent those actors and filmmakers from working for any other studio during the duration of that contract. It was possible for a studio to sign a popular actor, let's say, to a contract and then not do anything with that actor except

prevent them from being in any other studio works. So it was a way of, you know, taking an actor off the shelf so that competitor couldn't make use of them if they need be. Studios could also they were constantly producing movies. It was just a movie generating bis this it was almost like mass production of film, so people were at work all the time that there was very little downtime in those movie studios. Moreover, the studios

were very powerful even with independent theaters. The studios could throw their weight around. They would negotiate with theater owners using a tactic called block booking and sometimes blind bidding

as well. So in block booking, studios would withhold sought after films unless the theater owners agreed to buy copies of other movies from that same studio, and usually they were lower quality, mediocre films that no one was really clamoring to see, and independent filmmakers who were not working in the studio system found this practice to be unfair

for a few reasons. One was if all the theaters in a region are beholden to studios because they've agreed to these block booking tactics and it's filled up their theaters, there may not be any play time for them to

run into in film. For another, sometimes independent filmmakers would partner with studios for distribution, but then the studio would use that independently produced film to again be part of block booking and say, if you want to screen this movie, you also have to take these other twelve crappy films, and sometimes the block would be such a large block of programming that a theater's entire year's worth of programming would be taken up in one deal. And it was

seen as a very anti competitive practice. Even early on in the silent era, this was seen as a problem. So, like I said, it created kind of a monopoly. And so then the United States, the Department of Justice began to push back against the film industry. Way back in nineteen twenty one, the Federal Trade Commission or FTC declared that the block booking method that the studios were using was anti competitive, and they also began to investigate the

industry further. That culminated in nineteen twenty eight with a lawsuit against Paramount Pictures. The case also named nine other studios. Paramount was of paramount importance, but they were all kind of lumped in together. The case actually took two years to complete. In the Department of Justice, one a decision that stated the film studios did in fact represent a

monopoly and they want a judgment against block booking. But rather than enforce a ban on block booking, nothing was done, And it wasn't that the government changed its mind about the practice, but rather, this was also the time when the Great Depression was hitting and films were a type of escapism and they were seen as an important way

to preserve morale. So President Roosevelt's administration decided not to break up the studio theater relationship or to enforce a ban on block booking, and things continued as before for a time in order for more films to come out. The Roosevelt administration was afraid that by going in and regulating the industry during a time of depression, uh it would mean that films would stop coming out, people wouldn't

have that escapism, and things would get even worse. The time of the studio dominance would finally end in May nine. That's when the Supreme Court settled the issue once and for all, declaring block booking to be anti competitive and that the movie studios had to sell off their theater chains, and that broke up the studio system. Now there were still film studios, but they would only be in the business of making movies, not the entire chain or vertical

of film from production to screening. This was good news for independent filmmakers and for independent theater owners, but they had another technology that was just beginning to emerge that was a big cause of anxiety, which would be television. TV had been around for a bit, but it wouldn't be until the nineteen forties and fifties that started to

become a larger concern. Now, jumping back over to the music industry, just to close out this episode, I want to talk about the development of the forty five and the long playing album or LP. So for decades re or than music was limited by capacity problems on a single disc or cylinder, and by this time we're just talking discs. No one was making cylinders anymore. There's just only so much space you can use on a surface

to carve out a groove. The technology and material that recording studios had to work with meant that the grooves had size limitations too. You couldn't make the grooves too small. But that changed thanks to Peter Carl Goldmark. Now, if you listen to my episodes about our CIA, you heard me mention gold Mark, who worked for our CIA's rival Columbia.

Gold Mark had a team of staff and they began to investigate the possibility of developing a long playing record album that would work when play back at thirty three and one third revolutions per minute. So remember the industry standard at that time was seventy eight revolutions per minute, largely because recording and playing records on older materials at slower speeds resulted in lower quality audio. There had been a couple of times where people had tried to do

thirty three a third playback albums. They weren't long playing albums because they still had a limited number of grooves on them, but it was never financially viable. It was never economically viable to launch with those technologies. So this was a new attempt. So Goldmark wanted to do two things. He wanted to reduce the revolution speed and increase the number of grooves you could fit on one side of

a twelve or ten inch record disc. Doing both of those things would extend the playing time for a record. If you had a twelve inch record, you could get more than twenty minutes of audio per side, and that would remove a lot of the frustrating limitations the recording industry had been dealing with since it had started. So again, earlier efforts had been thwarted by those technical and economic challenges. It would take a few years for the economy to

recover and for World War two to end. That also happened during this time, and then you would get the right environment to launch a new format for recorded media. Within that time, gold Mark worked on perfecting his vision. He formed teams focused on specific problems. So one team would work on a turntable design meant to play at that thirty three and a third rpm and with a stylist that's capable of fitting in a much smaller groove. Another team worked on fine tuning the material they would

use to make albums. They had been depending on shellac, but that was not going to work, so then they started practicing with vinyl. They found that vinyl was more durable, it produced less noise, and it worked well at that thirty three and a third speed, so they went with that. Another team worked on creating the right recording instruments, including a cutting head that would make those small grooves in

the first place. They were called micro grooves, and it would take nearly a decade of work before the technology and the economy were both ready. So the thirty three and a third LP record debuted in nineteen forty eight. That was the same year the Supreme Court busted up the studio systems, and because you could fit as much music on a single disc as would normally require a dozen or so discs, those single discs were also called albums.

So if you ever wonder why it's called a record album, it's because in the old days you had a physical album full of multiple discs that represented a piece of music. Now you could fit all of that and more on one disc. The following year, nineteen forty nine, was when r c A would release the forty five record format.

While the thirty three and a third album's measured twelve inches across, forty five were seven inches, and they were called forty five because they would play back at forty five revolutions per minute rather than thirty three and a third. R c A produced them in a variety of colors, originally using color to designate the genre of music that the albums belonged to. Actually, I shouldn't call them albums.

The records belonged to the forty fives at the time could hold around five to seven minutes of music if you were to optimize them. Most popular songs at the time still clocked in and around three sometimes four minutes.

Forty five's typically would have a single song per side, but by the late nineteen eighties the technology had improved to the point where you could fit more than ten min it's to a single side of a forty five, and so you have three standards all battling it out at the same time, you had seventy eight, forty five and LPs. The seventy eight would eventually bow out. In fact, they bowed up first, fading away in the nineteen fifties, and then the forty five and LPs would continue to

shape music. Popular music groups would collect songs together to create an album. Albums were something that only a few artists had been able to produce before that a lot of them would produce a single song or two songs maybe, and just release one disc so to do the singles, but in seventy eight format rather than forty five. But now it was possible to group lots of songs together.

They would also release singles on forty five, which in turn could help encourage fans to buy the longer albums and discover other songs that weren't in single format, and later artists would begin to explore other possibilities within the medium, including concept albums, and a const album is one where all the songs of the album are thematically or totally linked in some important way, so that the songs can

be considered not just individually but collectively. Now, you could argue that the concept album debuted before the LP, but it was a novelty at the time because it was such an endeavor to produce an album consisting of numerous discs. But the Woody Gut three album dust Bowl Ballads, you

could say that was the first concept album. They all had to deal with the same sort of subject material, and that particular album consisted of six discs, and it was sold in two collections of three discs each, so you had kind of a part one and a part two. So six discs, twelve sides, all dealing with the songs about the same subject matter. That would arguably be the first concept album. But the LP made those sort of projects much easier to produce, and that led to some

really interesting experimentation in music and form. It would lead to very interesting, weird concept albums and then things like rock operas and other uh extensions of the art. So we're gonna leave off from this at this point. We're gonna wrap this episode up, uh, And just to remind everyone, this is the time where albums and singles are now available and you can purchase them and play them at home,

assuming you had a turntable. At the time, there were films and theaters under a new system that emerged from beneath studio control. Television, which I'll talk about more in the next episode, had debuted in the nineteen twenties, but electronic TVs had really only become available in the late nineteen thirties, and we're just starting to emerge from a

niche industry right around the late forties. In the next episode, we're going to look at TV and Hollywood's involvement with television, and we'll also touch on radio a little bit, and then we'll talk about the rise of the home theater industry and how that shook things up, as well as the emergence of new forms of media formats, and we'll continue to look at how that shaped the media itself and how it shaped the way we consume media and

our our thoughts about media. So this is, like I said, a pretty broad topic, but one that I really wanted to tackle because I think it's fascinating personally. UM, and if you guys have any suggestions for other broad topics you would like to hear, maybe two or three episodes about why not send me a message the email addresses tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com or pop on over to our website that's tech stuff podcast dot com.

You'll find links there to our social media presence, as well as the archive of all our past episodes and a link to our store. Every purchase you make there goes to help the showing. Greatly appreciate it, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.