Pick a Day

Music History Events: Technology

November 8, 1887 Emile Berliner is granted the first patent for the gramophone. In the 1890s, he starts manufacturing gramophone players and discs, but in the early 1900s the Victor Talking Machine company becomes the market leader.

February 19, 1878 Thomas Edison patents the phonograph.

October 24, 2020 Billie Eilish pulls off Where Do We Go? The Livestream, the first large-scale virtual concert with extended reality (XR) effects, which immerse and interact with the performers (Eilish, her brother Finneas, and drummer Andrew Marshall), and shift scenes from song to song. Tickets cost $30.

March 29, 2020 With most of the world homebound as the coronavirus pandemic takes hold, Elton John hosts the "Living Room Concert For America" from his home, featuring virtual performances by Mariah Carey, H.E.R., Backstreet Boys, and Tim McGraw. The concert raises money to help local food banks and support first responders during the crisis.More

June 30, 2015 Apple launches a new streaming service, Apple Music.

September 26, 2014 Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke releases his second solo album, Tomorrow's Modern Boxes, for just $6 on the peer-to-peer file-sharing platform BitTorrent. According to the album's producer, Nigel Godrich, "It could be an effective way of handing some control of Internet commerce back to people who are creating the work." In just over a week, the album averages 1.8 million downloads.

July 24, 2014 Chubby Checker settles his lawsuit with Hewlett-Packard over their app: "The Chubby Checker." The app, which sold for 99 cents, purported to estimate a man's penis size based on his shoe size.

September 10, 2013 Apple announces iTunes Radio, a streaming service that is essentially a competitor to Pandora, creating radio stations based on a particular song, artist or genre.More

August 20, 2012 A Green Day version of the video game Angry Birds is released, featuring Billie Joe Armstrong, Mike Dirnt and Tre Cool as green pigs. Players can unlock a new Green Day song from the 10th level of the game.

January 29, 2008 Prog rock band The Mars Volta release their album The Bedlam in Goliath. As a promotion, the band also gives away a CD-vinyl single, a special format with an optical side readable in CD players and a vinyl side that plays on a turntable for about three minutes. Both sides contain a cover of Pink Floyd's "Candy and a Currant Bun." The Bedlam in Goliath debuts at #3 on the Billboard 200.

October 30, 2006 Keane becomes the first major act to release a song on a USB memory stick. For £3.99, fans can purchase the 512MB drive at HMV stores, plug it into a computer, and transfer the track "Nothing In My Way" along with various videos and screensavers. The "single on a stick" format would fail to catch on.

April 11, 2006 For the 25-year anniversary reissue of David Byrne and Brian Eno's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts album, the multi-tracks for two songs - "A Secret Life" and "Help Me Somebody" - are made available for download, for fans to remix and upload to the website.

May 11, 2000 Napster, which lets users download songs posted by other users for free, wins the Webby award for best music site, beating out Launch.com, Wired Planet, sputnik7 and FarmClub.

July 21, 1999 MP3.com, a website that lets users download music files for free, goes public and quickly reaches a valuation of $6.9 billion. Months later, they're sued by various record companies and the RIAA. In 2001, it sells to Vivendi for $372 million.

June 1, 1999 Napster, a file-sharing service that lets users download songs for free, goes online. It shuts down in 2001 amid a raft of lawsuits, but not before upending the music industry, which sees a steep decline in sales of CDs.

December 17, 1997 MP3.com goes online, allowing independent artists to make their music available for download. It goes public in 1999 but runs into legal problems when posting music by major-label acts. In 2001, it's sold to Vivendi, which sells it in 2003 to CNET, which is just interested in the domain name.

June 24, 1993 The California band Severe Tire Damage pull off the first webcast in history, live streaming a concert from the Xerox Research Center in Palo Alto to an extremely small audience. The next year, The Rolling Stones become the first major artist to do a webcast.

June 18, 1985 Weird Al Yankovic's Dare To Be Stupid, featuring the Devo-inspired title track, makes history as the first album of comedic music ever released on compact disc.