Repeated Takes: A Short History of Recording and its Effects on Music

Repeated Takes is the first general book on the history of the recording industry, covering the entire field from Edison’s talking tin foil of 1877 to the age of the compact disc.

Michael Chanan considers the record as a radically new type of commodity which turned the intangible performance of music into a saleable object, and describes the upset which this caused in musical culture. He asks: What goes on in a recording studio? How does it affect the music? Do we listen to music differently...