Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff works.

Hey there and welcome to TechStup. I'm your host Jonathan Strickland. I'm an

executive producer with how stuff works and I heart radio and love all things Tech

and in a

a previous episode just not too long ago I traced the journey of recorded audio and film

from early commercial efforts up to about 1950 when a couple of really big things were happening.

So in the film industry around 1948, the studio system model was broken up by the US government because it was a monobolicic type of structure.

Up to that point, Movies Studios had had kind of a death grip on the entire process of producing movies.

They had everything from exclusive contracts with talent and directors and writers

to owning film processing facilities to owning

chains of movie theaters.

So they owned the means of production,

of distribution, and exhibition.

And the studios were able to leverage their power

through block booking to force independent

theater owners to agree to screen mediocre films in order to get access to the

popular movies that people actually wanted to see., if you want big tent pole picture A, you're going to have to take this other

dozen of mediocre Westerns as well. But then the Supreme Court waded in and brought all that to an end.

Now in the recording industry, the emergence of the 33 and a third and 45 RPM records

meant that the venerable 78 rBM format was no longer the only game in town.

And microgroves allowed recording studios to fit more audio on each side of a record.

So that gave birth to the long playing album and the 45 single, both of which

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