On December 24, 1877, Thomas Edison filed a patent for a new invention he referred to as a “talking machine”…for the first time ever, audio could be captured, played back, stored, shared, and analyzed…

When asked what the point of his machine was, Edison listed some future possibilities….

His phonograph (as he called it) would eventually be used as a method of preserving great speeches….it could also be used for making audio letters, giving dictation, a talking clock, a telephone answering machine, and remote learning…and way down the list was “reproduction of music”…

That original talking machine technology has evolved greatly over the years and the “capture and reproduction of music” has moved way up on Edison’s original list of uses…the recorded music industry is now worth tens and tens of billions of dollars…

But the phonograph also gave birth to a new type of music industry…when it first went on sale, copyright laws weren’t ready…they had been drafted and enforced with the printed word in mind, not with audio recordings…this meant that people began making recordings that weren’t exactly authorized in the proper ways…

This gave birth to another industry, one that worked in the shadows of record labels, music publishers, performing rights organizations, and all the rest of the legitimate record music industry…

What started with secretly recorded Edison phonograph cylinders progressed through reel-to-reel tape recordings, unauthorized vinyl records, cassettes, CDs, and digital files freely traded online…you may have some of these recordings in your collection—and you may not even know it…

The original name of such recordings is “bootlegs”…here are a few things about them that you might wanna know…

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