Before the invention of radio, how did people hear popular music?
There’s no one neat definition of popular music – there are overlaps with art and folk music, and styles varied across eras and cultures – but, broadly speaking, we can say that it’s commercial music with mass appeal. Radio, which really took off in the 1920s, was an ideal medium for sharing music. The recording industry began around the same time as Guglielmo Marconi developed his wireless telegraph (radio) in the 1890s. Thomas Edison had earlier invented the phonograph, in 1877, but it was Emile Berliner’s flat-cut disc of 1894 – the gramophone record – that made the mass production of recordings possible. Interestingly, it wasn’t a pop musician who became the first recording star (and, in the process, a millionaire): that honour goes to the operatic tenor Enrico Caruso. Before the recording era, people would have heard popular music live and first-hand. Some historians point to New York’s Tin Pan Alley as the birthplace of popular music. It was here that the American sheet-music publishing industry took off after 1885, tapping into the booming appetite for songs that could be accompanied on the piano. But we might also look to 19th-century Britain, where all self-respecting middleclass homes had a piano. Even earlier, a forerunner of massmarket popular music had emerged in Britain: the broadside ballad. At the height of the form’s popularity in the 17th century, broadside ballad song sheets, each costing about a penny, were sold in their hundreds of thousands. Essentially the pop music of the day, such ballads were sung across the country, and might be heard anywhere from alehouses to the streets. Rebecca Franks, journalist specialising in music