From Tinfoil to Wi-Fi: How the Music Business Turned Itself Inside Out

A short history of formats, gatekeepers, and the occasional $45 hoodie.

First, a lamb. Then an industry.

In 1877, Thomas Edison spoke “Mary had a little lamb” into a tinfoil phonograph and heard his voice come back. Imagine inventing recorded sound and giving your first take to a nursery rhyme. No publicist. No presave campaign. Just a man, a crank, and a lamb.

A few years later, Emile Berliner pushed sound onto flat discs. His gramophone helped set the stage for records that could be pressed and sold at scale. Music had become something you could take home, stack on a shelf, and argue about with your friends.

New format, familiar business

Shellac 78s gave way to vinyl LPs and 45s after World War II. Cassettes let us make mixtapes; the Walkman let us take them everywhere. CDs arrived and persuaded a lot of us to buy our favorite albums all over again. Respectfully, that was a very good business.

The container kept changing, but the basic transaction was easy to understand: make a recording, manufacture copies, and sell them. Live shows mattered enormously, too. They built audiences and earned money in their own right, while often helping move records.

The album loses its grip

The internet loosened the packaging. Apple introduced the iPod in 2001 and opened the iTunes Music Store in 2003 with 99-cent individual tracks. You no longer had to buy twelve songs because you loved one. Somewhere, the carefully sequenced album sighed deeply.

Then streaming made the shelf optional. Spotify launched in 2008 and reached the United States in 2011. For listeners, it was incredible: an ocean of music in a pocket. For artists, it changed what a “sale” even meant.

There is no universal penny-per-play check. Streaming services pool subscription and advertising revenue, then allocate royalties according to listening share and rights agreements. What finally reaches an artist depends on who owns the recording and publishing, and on the deals in between. If someone hands you a magic per-stream number, ask to see the rest of the math.

The great reversal—with an asterisk

The old shorthand was: the tour promotes the record. For many artists today, a new release can help promote the show, the fan community, the merch, and whatever comes next. A song may be the introduction; the ticket is where a fan chooses to spend an evening with you. The hoodie might come home, too. I have no objection to a good hoodie.

That is a useful way to think about the shift, but it is not a law of nature. Some artists earn substantial recording and publishing income. Others depend more on live work, direct support, sync licensing, teaching, or several things at once. There is no single spreadsheet that describes every musician’s life.

Everybody’s mother is on Spotify

Here is the part I keep coming back to: streaming democratized availability. It did not magically democratize attention. Uploading a track is easier than ever. Getting a stranger to stop scrolling, listen, remember your name, and come back for the next song? That still takes work.

Spotify says it paid more than $11 billion to the music industry in 2025, with independent artists and labels accounting for about half the royalties. That is real money and real opportunity. It is also an enormous field of people trying to be heard. Your mom’s stream counts, and I hope she likes the mix, but she cannot be the entire marketing department.

In the label era, a company might fund recording and promotion, then recoup those costs from an artist’s earnings. Today, independent release tools remove a gatekeeper and put more decisions in artists’ hands. That freedom is powerful. It also means making the music and making a plan for how people will find it.

So release the song. Make it sound like you mean it. Then tell its story, play it for people, connect with the listeners who care, and give them a reason to stay. Distribution used to be the locked door. Now the door is open onto a very crowded room.

Same dream. Different gatekeepers. And yes, the line is longer—but at least we get to choose what we sound like while we wait.

— Christos Tsantilis