How a forgotten 1949 Format War shaped the future of records

have you ever wondered why singles and albums on vinyl records are so different from each other in specifications probably no it's not the kind of thing that would keep many people awake at night but just bear with me here and let's just have a look at this this is a single seven inches across album 12 inches well that makes sense this has more music on it but then this being smaller also plays at a faster speed 45 revolutions per minute as opposed to an album thirty-three and a third now those two numbers don't really have much relation to one another it's not like this is double the speed of this swaddle plus 50% it's two different numbers also this has a large spindle hole in the middle whereas this has a small spindle hole now we're looking at this from a u.s. perspective in this video in the UK we use the same small spindle hole on the album on singles but I'll talk about that perhaps later on in the video so talking about this for the u.s. perspective that's a single that's an album not really too much in common with one another I mean they both play on a turntable they both spun around and read with a stylus but as far as the actual specs go they don't really seem all that related and that's because they're not this is the remnants of a format war a format war that took place 70 years ago these are rival and competing formats deliberately incompatible from two separate companies although this was a format war that pretty much kind of everyone won in the end which is a bit of a rarity so in this video we're going to go back to the 1940s and have a look at the Apple of the speeds 45 vs. LP [Music] I think the best place to start with this tale is at the beginning I'm not going to go all the way back to the Edison cylinder though that's a story for another day but following the Edison cylinder the next agreed standard was the 78 record now how some of these have been introduced in 1898 but really it became the standard round about 1910 now a disc like this a 10-inch disc would hold three minutes worth of music how'd that twelve inch disc would hold between four and five minutes worth now I'm sure most people are aware that 78 rpm records are a little bit fragile if you drop them they'll smash that's because they're made out of a thing called shellac although not everyone knows what Sherlock actually is shellac is a resin secreted by the lac bug I think it's the thing they make their cocoons out of it's left on trees this stuff so it's then collected and the resin is actually called Lac but once it's been processed into dried flakes it becomes known as shellac it's a fact that's always amazed me that all those records out there all that music that people were listening to was being listened to off bug secretion but by the time the 1930s rolled around the 78 rpm record was already starting to look a little bit long in the tooth there been a number of advances in the areas of music recording and reproduction technologies and thus MTA didn't really keep up the record companies decided that it was time to replace this with a more modern format perhaps something that could hold more music on a side something that had a better quality of audio to it was less prone to wear and tear and breakage and indeed something like that would have come out a lot sooner if a little thing hadn't got in the way called World War 2 so all the plans to replace the 78 were then put on hold until after the end of the war and of course it took a while after the war finished before things started to get back to normal so it was June 1948 when Columbia introduced what they believed was going to be the next big music distribution format and they call this the long playing microgroove non-breakable vinyl i'ts record also known as the LP it feels like everyone was more than ready for a new format as well the retailers were keen to stock it and the public was happy to buy it there were clear advantages to it there was 45 minutes on a single record fine its own quality cheaper and made from unbreakable vinyl ight incidentally I vote that anyone who calls records vinyls should start calling them vitalize from now on in this arrow on the right it says now a complete album of music on one record what do they mean by that well of course we're familiar with the term album being used for music but this is referring back to the original meaning of the word which is a book containing pages or pockets for storing things like photographs or stamps or in this case records yes this is an album on 70s and as you can see it's a hardback book containing in this case 478 headings records in pockets this entire album is 22 minutes and 19 seconds in length of course for a while albums in this format on 70s continued to be issued alongside the new LP and I'll show you a 10-inch LP of this same album and of course this is more than capable of holding that whole book or album on one single disc this is an early LP one of the first I think 1948 approx and it's on a 10-inch disc a lot of the early albums were on 10-inch 12-inch became more popular later but just have a look at the spacing between the tracks here there's quite a bit of a gap between each track which is something you don't tend to see on modern albums I don't know if that was just because it was an early one and that's how they made them or if they intended to have a bit more space between each track so you could put the stylus down in the right place to access an individual song a couple of interesting things to note here the new LP has a larger label than the old 78 and also neither of these formats mention the speed on them I could understand that as far as the 78 goes because it had been the only format so you didn't need to mention it however once the LP cable long they didn't feel the need to write 33 and a third on here either until the 45 came along Columbia weren't in the hardware business so Philco made the first LP capable record players is in interesting to see they were attempting to make the transition to this new format as easy as possible you could buy an LP player to attach to your existing system for $29 or you could choose for a range of new double tonearm radio photographs which were capable of playing both the new LP and your existing collection of 78 now I'd imagine that most people watching this video are familiar with the term LP still if I was to say I've got the LP of something you'd know that I meant I got the long playing record it's more likely though that I'd say I've got the album rather than LP and you'll get the album charts and you'll get the singles charts I think I think that's still around and if I got something on a compact disc you'd say well he's got the album on the compact disc you weren't said to say he's got the LP it's funny that because of course we're referring back to the book when we're talking about the album the book of 78 that came before the LP so why is that term hung around where an LP seems to have dropped off a little bit well there might be a reason for that when Columbia came out with their LP they found that only parts of this that they were able to get any kind of copyright on was the term LP the rest of it was all prior art so anyone could release a compatible 33 than the third disc the only time they'd have to pay Columbia anything is if they called it an LP so to get around paying them a sin you can just release a long playing record at 33 in the third I'd just call it an album it's earned that people are already familiar with so maybe that's why we tend to use the term album more than LP because LP is just Columbia the music trade press was understandably bullish on the new format it was a bit of a shot in the arm to the whole industry and billboard had the job of explaining it to their readers many of who only knew an industry that had been based around the 78 at the launch presentation in New York the space-saving advantages of this new format were a blur demonstrated by an 8-foot stack of a hundred of one old-style 78 rpm albums compared against a 1 foot pile that contained the same number of the new LPS Columbia revealed that before settling on the LP they'd investigated other technologies including film beep wire and 16-inch transcription discs however they decided on the LP as it had the long playing capability they needed can buy with improved fidelity and could be sold much cheaper than the alternatives while also allowing a gradual transition rather than making all previous technologies obsolete that sir microgroove was coined because the new LPS are between 224 and 300 micro grooves per inch as opposed to the 90 of the previous formats the new system also use the lightest pickups yet that only put 1/5 of an ounce pressure on a discus approximately 5.7 grams and were able to reproduce a wider range of sounds with an almost complete absence of surface noise so at launch everything seems set for these new 33 and a third long player records to become a success this was a long overdue update of these new LPS were clearly an improvement over the old 78 albums there's an interesting little factoid about 33 and third records which is going to come back into this story in a moment but it's not about the Columbia format now the Columbia one was introduced in June 1948 it's pretty much the same as what we're using nowadays compatible but if you were to go earlier than that there was another attempt to prior attempt to release a 33 and a third format and it was done by Victor the division of RCA and that was at the end of 1931 their version of a 33 and a third record was capable of 15 minutes per side as opposed to the 22 and a half of the later Columbia format and it didn't use the vinyl that was produced after the war it was using a another type of material and unfortunately it didn't wear well the heavy pickups of the time destroyed the records after just a few plays and the complaints about this new format were so intense that they had to take it off the market very quickly the first job of the new general manager of Victor in 1933 apparently was to take this product off the market now that chaps name is Edward Wallace Stein and that's a name that I want you to remember because it's gonna come up in a moment so here he is Edward all Ted Wallis Stein Oh Wallace Dean and here he is again at the launch of Columbia's LP yes in 1948 Ted was the chairman of the board of color records incorporated and he was the chap who demonstrated their new LP to the press at the launch so this Edward Wallace Dean Wallace Township was the driving force behind the LP now he'd worked at RCA but in the 1930s he'd moved across to CBS and he was the chap who convinced CBS to by Columbia Records from the American record corporation when CBS acquired Columbia Records in 1939 Edward Wallace Dean Stein became the president of Columbia Records and the first thing he set about doing was getting them to create a 33 and a third LP so how much of his knowledge at that point he brought across from RCA I don't know but he had been involved in that project over there so you can imagine this when it came out would have created a bit of bad blood between them but the one thing he did that was very smart in the beginning was when he started in 1939 the first thing he did was to tell his engineers at Columbia Records to start mastering ready for 33 and a third at that point they'd be mastering for 78 they had to produce two masters one for 78 one for 33 and a third but by doing that when the LP came out in 1948 they were ready to go with hundreds of records on this new format now the reason for the delay of course we mentioned the war got in the middle he started in 1939 on this project it came out in 1948 but another reason for the delay after the war was they were trying to get their record up to holding 17 minutes aside he determined that the optimum length for the record was 17 minutes or that was a minimum at least because he looked at classical works classical works with the big sellers on long players and he wanted to be able to hold at the average classical work on one disc on half on each side so whilst his engineer is working on this problem for those years of course all the music that's coming out on 78 is secretly also being mastered on 33 and 1/3 so that when it did come out they were able to release all these records in this excellent quality on this new format and their competitors were I suppose in a way caught sleep but you can't really blame them because they just had no idea this was happening in the background so when they started releasing their records on the LP or the album as they would have called it 13 a third record these competitors they didn't have any 33 and a third masters so their records didn't sound as good and they often had to put a little warning on the back of them to say along the lines of yes sorry this has been mastered from an old 78 master type of thing whereas the Columbia Records obviously sounded an awful lot better of course Columbia couldn't go it alone with a new format no one was going to buy a new record player just to play Columbia Records so they needed to get other record labels on board with the LP and convinced them to release their artists on the format as well in April 1948 a coupla months before the launch of the LP Columbia invited RCA over to tell them all about this new formats to give them a bit of a presentation get them on board and apparently in this meeting RCA seemed a little bit crestfallen now I mentioned before how the Edward Wallace tides steamship was the same shampooed cams thirty-three and a third at RCA in 1933 and here he was in 1948 telling RCA about Columbia's new 33 and a third format you can kind of imagine how that might grate a little bit and there a couple of days after this meeting RCA got back in touch and said no we're just not interested in this format at all and then a couple weeks after that invited Columbia over to tell them what they were developing and really they didn't really have much to say that we're giving vague references to things about tape and you remember that RCA subsequently went on to introduce their sound tape cartridge in the 1950s RCA were quite big on tape but didn't seem to have any kind of consumer format that they were going to launch they didn't mention the 45 at all in this meeting and it doesn't look like they were trying to conceal it there's just something they weren't thinking about at the time so they both went their separate ways and then RCA resurrected the 45 which was a project apparently they'd started just like Columbia before the war which had been put on hold and they'd kind of mothballed it have forgotten about it but because of this LP and presumably this rivalry which didn't really help they thought right we're gonna have to get that one out and we're gonna have to have something to compete against this LP from our deadly rival Columbia of course got word of this so before RCA launch their new format Columbia went on the offensive in the trade press to put retailers fears at rest and to tell everyone how well the LP was selling and that it was here to stay but then in January 1949 RCA announced their new system to the press the details explained that this new as-yet-unnamed format would be seven inches across would play at 45 rpm and will be based around a changer unit now record changes were nothing new you could get changes for 78 but apparently it was going to be integral to the experience with this new format there was no definitive word on their maximum play time of a 7-inch disc but they definitely weren't going to be long players interestingly the name was proving to be an issue since the LP held 45 minutes of music and the RCA discs but at 45 rpm they thought this might lead to some confusion during development it had gone by the name of Madame X but in the end they just stuck with 45 RCA we're about a year behind the LP when they launched so they were playing catch-up and as a result they blitz the press with advertising taking over the first 20 or so pages of this issue of Billboard each page showed one of their top artists at the top and then at the bottom they listed a total of 23 benefits of the 45 we're going to look at some of those later you might have heard someone say in the past that the large hole in a 45 is there to make it easier for jukeboxes to handle them and yes they are easy for jukeboxes to handle with a large hole but it's interesting to know that this was launched as a home system when the 45 came out there wasn't a single jukebox on the market that was able to play them however because of the efficient disc changer mechanism the first 45 players were really jukeboxes for the home and it just so happens I've got one of those early machines here this is a 45 ey - they never sold these in the UK however this one comes from a chap on ebay who imports these in a Okin state fixes them up and modifies them so they can be used at the UK unfortunately this process means they lose their tube amplification but it also means I can demonstrate one in this video if you wanted to run an original untouched one your power supply would need to be a hundred and twenty volts and 60 Hertz so I'll just give you a quick tour around it's not much to see the part that's been repainted red is made of bakelite this is a basic standalone model with a built-in speaker a volume control on the side and around the back that's where the power lead would originally have come out the silver colored section on the top is metal we've got the simple tone arm a 7-inch platter and there's one switch that toggles the power and changes a record the records are held on the silver section at the top of the center spindle and are individually release by the internal mechanism and you can stack up to ten records on that top part which they claimed would give you up to 50 minutes worth of music got the push of one button in this advert you can see the similar 9ey three model this one looks to have a bigger speaker than mine below that in the range though is a model without a speaker that's for attaching up to an existing system but there's a whole range of models here one of these can also play 78 but tellingly none of them are able to play a 33 and a third LP let's get back to that list of benefits of the new 45s it's important to note that this list is mainly comparing them against the 78 but some of the things mentioned here apply to LPS too however one thing they didn't mention which is my favorite feature of the new format and that's the colored vinyl you might tend to associate colored records with novelty now they're often issued for a special edition of a re-release of an old record the color of the vinyl offered matches something that's on the cover of the album but back in 1949 RCA launched 45s with their own color coding scheme Green was for country and western red classical midnight blue popular classics yellow for children's and black for popular now I haven't got them all here but there was also sky-blue for international and serese-- or orange for blues and rhythm that makes me wonder when we swaps around those words to R&B rather than be honor but anyway getting back to the colored discs they're also translucent and as you can see they really haven't lost any of their vibrancy even after 70 years but let's return to the benefits of 45 that are mentioned on this list now some of these repeat themselves and some only really apply to retailers so I'll pick out a few that are the most relevant number one they sound better now there's a couple of things here they sound better than 78 yes but a 45 rpm record should also sound better than a 33 and a third they also mentioned their golden throat system which RCA had been touting on their radios for a few years by this point it's about their speaker setup having a better overall sound quality moving on now to number two plays easier automatic easy to load world's fastest changer well I think it's time for a demo loading ten discs is easy and can be done one-handed as they say so let's look at the changer mechanism in action [Music] [Music] yeah it's definitely nippy and efficient they weren't wrong I'll give it that now I mentioned on that list of features that it does tend to repeat itself a bit so numbers 8 and 9 are pretty much repeating but splitting out what was already stated in number 2 but this world's fastest changer business was clearly a feature they were pushing as it appears in the adverts printed in magazines - so let's tie bit how long does it take between the end of one record and the start of the next [Music] [Applause] yes it's only approximately 10 seconds and it could be even quicker with a record that had a shorter run out three and four on the list might well be the most important features though the discs and the players were designed to be as affordable as possible and you could make up your own ten disc playlists just like having a home Tube box these features will ultimately go on to sell 45s to a younger crowd however let's not get ahead of ourselves here this was 1949 music then was primarily aimed at an older demographic and the best sellers were show tunes and classical music these types of recordings usually came on albums and bearing in mind the new RCA system wouldn't let you play LPS but as you can see here they state you can get albums on 45 so what did a 45 album look like well here you go it's a box of 7-inch records this particular album was a best seller the soundtrack to the stage musical South Pacific this example is on the new Columbia 10-inch LP but unlike RCA Columbia weren't also trying to sell you the hardware they just wanted you to buy their records and whatever machine you own they were happy to sell your records that fit on it so here's the South Pacific album issued on 45s if RCA had had their way this is how all albums would have looked to remember their 45 players wouldn't even play LP so if you wanted to play South Pacific and you only had an RCA 45 machine then this is how they expected you to buy it you'll notice that each of these discs has a number so to play the tracks in the right order you have to make sure that you've got all seven discs in sequence you then stack them up on the player with number one at the bottom and seven at the top and then once they've all been played from the bottom to the top you'd take them off flip them over and stack them up against a play through tracks 8 to 14 I assume that one of these 45 rpm album boxes would have being quite a bit more expensive to buy than a single 33 to third LP it would definitely cost more to make anyway and it's interesting that RCA were promoting the storage size of 45s as a plus point especially when a four-disc album comes in the same size box as an 8 disc one but they were comparing them really against the old 78 albums rather than the new LPS conveniently I can't disagree though with the fact that the record players themselves were more compact although I'll have to take their word on the fact they were used on trains planes and submarines like that LP much was being made out of the fact that these discs were non-breakable of course they are breakable but definitely not to the same extent as a 78 but one feature and every Leath ought about was how the large hole means that you can hold a stack of discs in one hand and easily avoid touching the grooves and that the touted feature of the 45 was that these were the first discs to be recorded in Seiler in the quality zone again you can see from this picture there comparing the 45 against the 78 as both this have a 5.3 minute play time but what they're saying is that they're keeping the music away from the center of the disc and I've noticed that these early discs really do have a wider run-out area that I'm used to seeing on more recent 7 inches this pressing of a 1969 record is only three minutes 18 long yet the run-out area is much narrower perhaps the quality zone wasn't deemed to be all that important after all then again Columbia were already minimizing the run-out on there 45s back in the early 1950s now in an age when people rarely stack records upon their turntables here's a fact about 45s that might have passed you by it states here that record surfaces do not touch you can store 45s either flat or vertically the idea of storing records flats will make some vinyl snobs apoplectic with rage but what does it mean by record surfaces do not touch well apparently 45s are designed so that a minor amount of space exists between them when they're stacked together this is achieved by the fact that underneath the label is a raised shoulder that sits slightly proud of the rest of the disc so if you stack 45s it's only the center part that searches but the recorded sections don't meet the common misconception is that if you do stack a bunch of 40 files like this then you're going to be scraping the surfaces against each other but in reality they're being carefully designed to keep the apart and this is one feature that's being carried all the way through from the 45s of the late 1940s to those of the 1980s and any current pressings unless the record is warped a modern-day 45 should still stack without scratching the wall next to it and laying it down on a flat surface will do it no harm at all now let's talk about tracking weight in the RCA adverts of the time they mentioned the new stylus pickups only put five grams of pressure on a disk I was wondering what difference the stylus playing the bottom or the top of a stack of ten records makes to this number so let's find out well a my specific turntable at the bottom it's exerting 4.1 grams and the top four point four so barely any difference at all so getting back to 1949 was the introduction of the 45 a runaway success well no in fact after a few months on sale billboard ran a survey with retailers about LPS and 45s that gives us a window into how well our ca's new format was selling out of 472 dealers who sold LP 72% of those said the sales were good or satisfactory the same question about 45s only 50% said their sales were good or satisfactory and 47% said they were disappointing RCA steadfastly refused to sell their records on the increasingly popular LP format though their artists were only available on 45s and 78 not only where the artists becoming uncomfortable with this situation but RCA themselves were missing out on potential sales especially to the lucrative classical market whose customers had been keen early adopters of the LP RCA were under pressure from all sides and in January 1950 just one year after the press launch of the 45 they relented and announced they too were going to start producing LPS RCA definitely weren't going to take this lying down though in one of the most embarrassing like pathetic passive-aggressive diatribes I've ever read they laid out - and I quote everyone in any way connected with the record business why they were right and everyone else was an idiot it's like a weird Dear John letter from a psychopath all the points they made on here could be prefixed with well actually I think you'll find that and then Suffolk's with so there for example let's pick a couple out the fact they list them as numbered facts also makes in all the more cringeworthy but anyway RCA Victor was the first in italics to make long-playing records our long playing record experiments began in 1916 they claimed that they then discontinued them because they weren't satisfied they answered the demands for a better record no mention of course of the fact that all these records self-destructed and the customer complaints forced them to pull the product from the market fact number four they say they developed microgroove records before a World War two but they decided not to make long-playing records as they thought everyone should have an entirely new system there was superior to any other system again no mention that they mothballed this project and forgot about it until Columbia brought out their LP and then that put their noses out of joint fact 5 RCA engineers proved by careful testing that 45rpm was the most efficient speed and 5-minute records would cover 90% of what people want to buy now there are a few stories about why 45 specifically was chosen as a speed but most believe the main purpose of choosing a different speed 233 in the third was just to make it incompatible and ensure people who bought the RCA records would have to buy the RCA disc to go on them in the RCA tradition of making long crazy lists facts 8 and 9 are really just repeating facts 4 and 5 fact 10 repeats facts dine and 5 again but adds that the breaks when the record changes are as the composer himself intended there I didn't think Mozart was around to comment on this in 1950 but in fact number 11 is where they repeat their made-up night of sense of music on 45s he's good enough but that other 10% with their long stupid record so I suppose will make them if they really do want them but we're really not happy about it and then they round it up with fact 12 that they're 33 and a third records will be better than everyone else's anyway you should really thank us for helping you out with that we really doing you a big favor here of course in reality they have no choice as early as 1949 he could buy a record player that would play all three speeds and change them as well there really was no reason whatsoever to tie yourself into RCA's 45 system when you could at the lot by buying another record player as well as begrudgingly making LPS RCA drop the colored vinyl scheme the colored vinyl costs more than the black and most of the 45 releases from here onward big clusters popular which came on the black vinyl anyway the box forty five albums died off to the idea of having these stacked under a 45 only record player soon became a distant memory RCA also started manufacturing their own three speed record players the 45 only players were repositioned towards a younger audience the prices of these were reduced considerably - which made them affordable to teenagers which by look or good judgment happened to put a 45 player in many bedrooms just in time for the arrival of rock and roll and RCA were now more than happy to sell this teenage market 45 singles or long playing albums it really didn't matter just so long as they were spending their money on RCA's artists but here's something to think about imagine the 45 system was the one that had won this battle of the speeds and the LP had died off in 1950 or whatever before the dawn of rock and roll and the big pop hits and things of the 60s do you think the album as a concept has been a box full of singles issued on this format would have carried on or would it have died off when people just started buying 45s in the 50s and 60s when the teenagers got into rock'n'roll and then into say the pop and things what would have happened to the concept type albums of the later part of the 60s through into the seventies I mean would it have worked on a stack of 45s in a box like this or would this idea of issuing an album just to have faded away entirely and we would have just had singles would things like Pet Sounds and Sgt pepper's and Dark Side of the Moon ever have happened I mean after all those albums are all really based around you're listening to a 12-inch record from the beginning to the end it's not about having a load of individual singles that you might to swap around and play in a different order for instance here's an album that definitely wouldn't have been the same if it had been issued as a box of 7-inch 45s in 1975 this is Pink Floyd's wish you were here and the first track on this LP is just over 13 and a half minutes long which would have necessitated a disc change in the middle which would definitely have upset the flow a bit and of course this is just one of many examples I suppose though that idea then came back round again with the introduction of things like iTunes where people bought a individual single off an album for 99p and perhaps might not have gone for the full album then created their own playlist which is exactly the idea that this had back in 1949 so these things kind of come around again but it'd be an interesting alternate reality where this was the format that took off and the the LP died before the rock and roll and pop revolution [Music] going right back to the beginning though I did mention that in the UK our 45s have the same size hole as our LPS and seventy-eights whereas in a number of other countries that wasn't the case and in the UK though we did have some with the larger hole the jukeboxes from say well it's ER and Seberg of course they came from the US and jukeboxes worked better with a large hole in the center of the disc so all the jukeboxes as far as I'm aware use the large hole system so for those off sometimes records were sold with an optional sensor in the UK that could be pushed out so you could put them in a jukebox or if you didn't have an optional sensor on your record which I've got to say I bought 50 singles here off eBay and 42 of them didn't have the optional sense they were just solid like this so with the dislike they should have to press out the sensor to put it on a jukebox and you'd use a tool called a dinkar now if you came across an ex jukebox disc or one where someone had accidentally punched out the center so you could play it on your machine you'd use an adapter in the middle these things are also known as spiders but one question I've got so the UK use the small hole that makes sense to be we never had the history of having this our CA machine in the UK so we didn't have anything that a large hole record would have fitted on so we'd always have to use an adapter so you might as well just bring out every record with a smaller spindle on it but then other countries around the world also opted for the larger hole countries such as for example France Spain Italy Germany their signals had the large hole on them there as far as I'm aware they never had the RCA machine either so I don't know why they opted for the incompatible hole and they'd always have to use with an adapter or use a record play that how does sort of built-in adapter so if anyone's got the answer to that maybe they could pop that in the comments below and I hope you've picked up a couple of all things for this I certainly have wannabe making it for example I never realized about the raised labels on 45s that were there too keep them apart when they were stacked something I never noticed from again nine years so it was fun doing this one hope you've enjoyed it too but that's it for the moment that's always thanks for watching [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Techmoan

Views: 675,820

Rating: 4.9593444 out of 5

Keywords: Techmoan, 4K, 45, LP, Records, Vinyl, 1949, Battle of the Speeds, format war, singles, albums, 45RPM, 78RPM, 33 1/3 RPM, LPs, history, why are singles smaller than albums, why singles have larger holes than albums, why albums are called albums, who owns the name LP, columbia, RCA, Format battle, singles vs albums, vinylite, microgroove

Id: hbFgVjijrHI

Length: 38min 30sec (2310 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 09 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/GentlemenPreferBombs]

This was really interesting.

[u/creamcolouredDog]

The format war where everyone won in the end