This Week 70 Years Ago LP Records Began Changing the Music Industry

By Ignatius Pereira-with due credits to the Voice of America

Seven decades ago (June 1948) something musical happened to sound. It changed the way people enjoyed music. This week seventy years ago the first long playing (LP) vinyl aarecord was introduced by Colombia Records, an American company, and it enabled people to listen to longer pieces of music. They were the first way fans could buy music to listen to at home. It enabled the release of albums.

The first microgroove LP released by Colombia Records was Columbia ML 4001, the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto in E Minor with soloist Nathan Milstein, and Bruno Walter conducting the Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra of New York.

The anniversary is being celebrated by the British music company HMV and the Sony Classical by recreating 500 copies of the first performance recorded to an LP. That recording was of a piece of classical music: Mendelssohn’s Concerto in E minor. Violinist Nathan Milstein performed the music with the New York Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra. All the copies of the LP are to be given away to fans, except for one, which will be donated to the British Library.

Prior to the introduction of LP records, all phonograph records for home use were made of an abrasive (and therefore noisy) shellac compound with a much larger groove, and played at approximately 78 revolutions per minute (rpm), limiting the playing time of a 12-inch diameter record to less than five minutes per side.

With LP records having a narrower groove and a slower speed, one could get up to 20 minutes, which meant...you could get a whole package of songs together on one record. In fact it was a huge step forward for sound recording and music.

Earlier, record companies had tried and failed to add more grooves to records to increase their playing time, but the shellac surface could not effectively hold all of the sound information of the smaller grooves. One of the major advances that had been made in the 1930s was the introduction of vinyl resins.

This first successful LP record was developed by Columbia Records, under the direction of Dr. Peter Goldmark, a Hungarian-born electrical engineer in his late thirties who had been delegated the task of developing a practical slow-speed microgroove record with a team of co-workers and Bill Bachman, Columbia’s research director. It made 33 and 1/3 revolutions per minute and became the standard for gramophone records for about 50 years.

It is said that with the invention Columbia Records put the needle down on history's first successful microgroove plastic, 12-inch, 33-1/3 LPs in New York, sparking a music-industry standard so strong that the digital age has yet to kill it. Before that time, music labels, including Columbia and RCA Victor, had failed to launch commercially successful 33-1/3 records to market, for various reasons. Although RCA Victor made attempts to introduce the first commercially available vinyl long-player designed for playback at 33-1/3 in 1931, the Great Depression shelved that ambitious project in 1933.

The added advantage of this week’s anniversary celebration is that it comes at a time when LP records are becoming popular again.