Recording industry

Recording industry, group of businesses that produce and sell sound recordings. The industry records primarily popular forms of music, as well as verbal communication such as speeches and seminars. The industry began with Thomas Edison's invention of the phonograph (1877), which pushed a sound-sensitive needle along the grooves of a cylinder to reproduce sound. The cylinder was replaced by flat disc—the phonograph record—in the early 1900s; this evolved into today's compact disc, which plays recorded sounds by means of a laser beam. Invention of magnetic recording tape in the 1940s enabled the development of cassette tapes. In the United States, the industry employs more than 30,000 people, among them musicians, composers, arrangers, and engineers. Most recordings today are done in studios.