From 78s to MP3s: The Embeddedness of Technology and the U.S. Market for Prerecorded Music (original) (raw)

2005, The Business of Culture: Emerging Perspectives on Entertainment, Media, and Other Industries

This chapter demonstrates the embeddedness of technology via the historical case of the US market for prerecorded music, which the recording industry has serviced since 1890. The case mostly emphasizes the period from 1940 – when the recording industry had fully recovered from its near demise – to the early 1990s – when the industry momentarily basked in the success of the compact disc. However, it also addresses the context that preceded 1940, and it comments on the unresolved flux that emerged in the late 1990s (e.g., Napster, MP3s). The prerecorded music market provides an ideal case because discussions of it abound with atomistic depictions. Indeed, much conventional wisdom suggests that new technologies – such as tape recorders and compact discs – provide the main (if not sole) impetus for epochal shifts in the production of prerecorded music. Drawing on archival and secondary sources, this case demonstrates the opposite. Transformations of the prerecorded music market resulted from the interplay between technology and contextual factors (e.g., copyright law), with the latter having the decisive impact. A particular variant of the embeddedness literature informs this case study – the new institutionalism in organizational sociology. I highlight salient aspects of this theory before presenting the case.