Hey, it's Alan, and I just wanted to let you know that you can now listen to the ongoing

history of new music early and ad-free on Amazon music, included with Prime.

On December 24, 1877, Thomas Edison filed a patent for a new invention he referred to as a

talking machine. For the first time ever, audio could be captured, played back, stored,

shared, and analyzed. When asked what the point of his machine was, Edison listed some future

possibilities. His phonograph, as he called it, would eventually be used as a method of preserving

great speeches. It could be used for making audio letters, giving dictation. It could be a

talking clock, a telephone answering machine. It could be used for remote learning. And way down the

list was reproduction of music. That original talking machine technology has evolved greatly over the

years, and the capture and reproduction of

music has moved way up on Edison's original list of uses. The recorded music industry is now

worth tens and tens of billions of dollars. But the photograph also gave birth to a new type of music

industry. When it first went on sale,

copyright laws regarding the phonograph and Edison cylinders weren't ready. They had been

drafted and they had been enforced, but with the printed word in mind, not with audio recordings.

So this meant that people began making recordings that weren't exactly authorized in the proper ways.

This gave birth to another industry, one that worked in the shadows of record labels, music publishers,

performing rights organizations, and all the rest of the legitimate recorded music industry.

What started with secretly recorded Edison phonograph cylinders,

progressed through wheel-to-reel tape machines, unauthorized vinyl records,

cassettes, CDs, and digital files freely traded online. You may have some of these recordings in

your collection, and you may not even know it. The original name of such recordings is bootlegs.

...