0:07  
I spent the summer of 2012 at my family cottage, working at a restaurant and building my savings. My dad also had what he called a fun little task for me to do. He wanted me to go through my late grandfather's impossibly enormous record collection, and sorted by genre, and then by artist alphabetically. I have no idea how many records were in that collection. I mean, about 60 fit in a box, and there were over 50 boxes. At the beginning of May, I stood in the shadow of that daunting wall of music, and wouldn't get through it all until October.

0:55  
This is a quick lesson in the history of music. I'm your host, Max Asper. This time we look at vinyl and the record player. Going through those 3000 something records changed me in a profound way. I'd always liked music, but that summer, I became an obsessive and somewhat of a historian. But I didn't know everything. I wondered where the record player came from. How did someone come up with this unimpressive looking needle and box contraption?

1:32  
Again, from a historical perspective, I grew up with a classic suitcase record player.

1:41  
That was Rob Sanzo, a longtime music producer, and now a Professor at Recording Arts Canada, a school in Toronto that teaches music production. 

1:50  
We had a an automatic record changer where the spindle would you could load five to seven singles and they would automatically just drop down and you could listen to several hits. And we listened to like the Osmond brothers and the Jackson Five and you know all the sort of teeny bopper bands because we were just little kids then.

2:09  
As you might have picked up, Rob is a deep and lifelong fan of music, and someone that was molded by his early experiences with the record player and vinyls. It has given him a fine, intimate knowledge of the medium.

2:23  
Well the actual phonograph was developed by Thomas Edison in 1877, and is basically a crude device that actually worked on sort of a wind up system where, you know, obviously winding a watch. You'd sort of give us a spring sort of energy by turning a handle, and then it would just play that back by turning to the kind of a, like a toilet roll size cylinder wrapped in metal tin foil where the needle would bounce up and down on and ah...

2:54  
So the original version of the record player was a phonograph and work sort of like a windup toy. It doesn't sound like a very practical device, and certainly not the one that would launch the music industry into the economic atmosphere. But it was improved on over the years until another milestone was reached, the gramophone.

3:17  
There was patent for the gramophone in 1887 by Emil Berliner, and he he was the inventor of the as we know now the flat disc and was first made of hardened rubber. And then later, they switched to shelac which was a good medium, although it was very brittle and break broke easily so they switch to like a polyvinyl later on. That's why it's called vinyl.

3:45  
It appears we have Emil Berliner and his gramophone to thank for the now iconic vinyl disc. Actually, it seems that most of today's musicians do too, as it would plant the seeds for an industry boom.

4:01  
The 20s was a bad time for the for the record industry because of the depression, but in the 30s, they developed the the long play which was a 12 inch 33 and a half. And then the 40s really took off and that was a golden age of recorded long plays, you know.

4:19  
What would come next was a landslide of legendary musical talent. From Elvis Presley and Otis Redding, to Aretha Franklin and the Beatles. They all were able to grow their fan base via the 45 inch single. Which was the next progression, but possibly also a step towards the end, a step closer to the CD.

4:41  
After that, the singles came out which were seven inch 45s, and I was the advent of the rock and roll era. And that kind of, you know, lasted all the way until the 60s through 60s and 70s. Apparently in the late 70s was the peak for for album sales and then shortly after the CD came out and that really you know the the sale of vinyl declined rapidly during the during the 80s.

5:14  
So there you have it. Rest in peace to the record player and it's precious final 18 something to 1980. Actually, the medium is making quite the comeback today. Record player and vinyl sales have been steadily rising for the last 13 years. So what's going on?

5:34  
People want to own their music, especially in the day and age where we're streaming all our music and we're paying a subscription fee. We don't actually own the music. Yeah, if you go on iTunes and you download a digital album, or you do that from like the artists website, you own those files. You can listen to it whenever you want, even if you unsubscribe. But with something like vinyl record, you actually own that piece of music, and you can play it whenever you want. 

5:58  
Jared Ackerman is the tour manager for popular rapper Russ. Having overseen the production and sale of Russ's vinyls, he understands why people are buying them again. And what today's new consumers find so unique about it.

6:12  
It has this cool factor where you can really set up like somewhere in your house where you can have like a listening experience with amazing speakers and it really just I think it brings a lot back into the listening experience from the music fan. 

6:27  
Major music publications like Genius and Pitchfork have grappled with this concept of the listening experience. Some say that after the record players stopped being the public's weapon of choice, people stopped experiencing albums in full from front to back. With all devices following the record player, you could skip songs and only listened to the ones you wanted to. At the same time, some people don't care about the experience at all. They simply just want a token of their favorite band.

6:59  
I think also, you know, it's a collector's item, people want to like have that piece, you know, you can get it signed. You can have it forever, so it really like is very popular for collectors. I think that with artists, one of the biggest things is maintaining their fan base and really pleasing to their fan base. And when you can go above and beyond and provide something to your fans, that like I said before, is tangible, and is a collector's item. For any diehard fan. I know myself, I have a small vinyl collection of all my favorite artists, albums. It's something that you can go get signed. So I think from an artist standpoint, it's like why wouldn't I do this? My fans want it. There's demand for it and it's going to in the long term they're going to have this forever. There always be this constant reminder of that piece of vinyl sitting in your collection ready to be listened to.

7:58  
So there you have it, folks. From Thomas Edison's phonograph to Rob Sanzo's suitcase record player to today's biggest rappers the record keeps spinning, the needle stays scratching, and vinyl and the record player stand the test of time. Be sure to tune in for episode two, where we look at speakers and the stereo system which really sparked the golden age of the music industry. This has been a quick lesson in music history. I'm your host Max Asper. Thanks for listening to me and also to music.