Since Thomas Edison first spoke the words “Mary had a little lamb” into his phonograph in 1877, the recording industry has been driven by a mixture of technological innovations and the pursuit of profit—each feeding off the other.

While Edison failed originally to see the popular entertainment uses of his phonograph (preferring the device as an office dictation machine), by the 1920s he was locked into battle with Columbia and Victor Records for talent and audience. In the 1920s, also, radio broadcasting of live and recorded music spread across the nation. Publishing rights to songs began to be licensed through ASCAP in 1914 and BMI in 1939.

A dazzling succession of technological breakthroughs, especially the introduction of electrical recording, allowed for a greater warmth and personality in recorded music, spawning modern popular music. Now, performers like Bing Crosby seemed to be singing directly to each individual listener.

While the Great Depression marked a low point for the recording industry (with record sales plummeting from a height of 100 million discs in 1927 to only 6 million in 1932), the onset of the Second World War brought two major changes to the business. On the technological side, wartime research in electronics led to improvements in sound quality through magnetic tape recording, the “unbreakable” long-playing rpm) and 45 rpm discs and “high-fidelity” playback equipment; after the war the invention of transistors by Bell Labs in 1948 revolutionized the radio. The other key to the transformation of the recording industry was the expansion of the consumer base with the baby boom. Teenagers in the 1950s spent an estimated 10 billion dollars anually much of that on records and radios.

The technological and market growth helped transform the nature of the music industry as well. Since the 1920s, the business had been largely controlled by a few dominant corporate media conglomerations. While that is the case to this day cheaper recording costs and an expanded marketplace allowed more independent record labels to flourish.

Especially with the advent of rock ’n’ roll as a mass-market phenomenon in the 1950s, smaller labels like Chess, Sun and Atlantic were able to achieve a degree of success in introducing popular music that the major labels ignored to varied audiences. While the majors caught on to the new musical genres and new markets (RCA, for example, bought out Elvis Presley’s contract from Sun in 1955 for the then astronomical sum of $35,000), independents have continued to fill the niches ignored by the majors.

Technological improvements continued to transform recorded music, from multi-track recording and Dolby noise reduction to the advent of digital recording in 1978 (though audiophiles might quarrel over whether digitization is an improvement). The compact disc and DAT in the 1980s and MP3 technology in the 1990s transformed recorded music into patterns of sound waves encoded as a sequence of numbers. The promise is of superior sound quality but the real revolutionary possibility rests with the new methods of distribution. While the recording industry is still controlled by a handful of multinational corporations (which seemingly change ownership weekly), the transmission of recorded sound over the Internet threatens to break their dominance.