The First Time Tech Ruined the Music Business The music business
was in turmoil at the turn of the century. Technological
innovation had made songs much easier to copy, and established
artists foresaw their sales plummeting. The companies that had
once dominated the industry were rapidly losing ground to
upstarts who produced new devices for playing music. The
established companies urged Congress to tighten up the law to
prohibit copying, while the innovators argued that any such
change would only harm consumers. This sounds like a story about
how Apple Inc. (AAPL) disrupted the music business in the past
decade, but it actually describes the years around 1900. The
technological change was the invention of sound recording.
Before sound could be stored and reproduced, the music business
was built on the sale of sheet music. Stephen Foster sold more
than 130,000 copies of “Old Folks at Home” in the early 1850s.
“On the Banks of the Wabash,” a hit in the 1890s for the
composer Paul Dresser, sold more than half a