The metal cylinder in the middle of the device was the section that held the sound. This could generally only hold around four minutes of music, and was very, very brittle and very expensive. This meant that only really very rich people could afford to use them, so something else had to be invented to make music more accessible for people to listen to in their homes.
This 'something' came around in 1887, when Emile Berliner invented the gramophone. The first gramophones played 7inch disks with lateral cut grooves, and became commercially successful in the 1890's. They had a hand mechanism, which mean that someone would have to wind the gramophone as the music played to keep it going. This meant that the music would only be played as fast as the person wound the gramophone, which meant that the quality would often leave more to be desired. Because of this, many people still preferred to use the phonograph, as it played at a more constant velocity.
(gramophone with a hand mechanism. http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Gramophone-Record-Player-78-vinyl-Phonograph-square-/321099682881)
However, a motor was added in 1896, which meant that people would no longer have to wind the gramophone up themselves. This improved the quality of the music, as it could now be played at a more consistent speed, and so it beat the phonograph and became the music player of choice.
Up until around 1960, there were very few developments in how people consumed music. These developments included things like records having increased playback quality, a longer duration of play, a more constant play speed (thanks to the motor), slower play seeds and larger disks that could contain more music.
In the 1960's, however, more portable methods of listening to music were invented. There were two new main formats; cartridges and cassettes. This led to a brief battle between the two, as both had their merits. Cartridges could allow 4 channel stereo sound, which is similar to the more modern surround sound, and these were less perishable than cassettes.
(examples of cartridges.http://www.recording-history.org/HTML/8track6.php)
Cassettes won this brief battle though, due to their ability to do more. The use of cassette tapes became the first way that people in the home could record themselves. They could record sounds onto the tapes, which could then be played on cassette players. Mini cassettes were introduced for use in dictaphones and answering machines.
(cassette tapes.http://scraphacker.com/mix-tapes-revisited/)
CD's were introduced in 1982, and by 1985, CD sales had overtaken vinyl records, and became the domestic music format of choice. However, early problems with skipping due to vibrations meant that portable cassettes were still the preferred portable format of the time. The first CD player was made by the now famous company Sony. The main advantages of these CD players were that the CDs had improved quality and durability to other formats. Digital audio then became the norm, with minidiscs introduced for personal recordings, with the added feature of being able to edit them.
(example of a minidisc next to a CD. http://seekknowledgeeveninchina.wordpress.com/2013/02/16/corporations-philips/)
MP3 was developed in 1991. The improvement of home computing technology allowed for ripping and burning MP3s to CDs. This is where pirating music first began, although it wasn't prevalent enough then to seriously affect the music industry.
Portable audio really lifted of in the noughties though, with the Ipod being released by Apple in 2001. These Ipods had a 5GB HDD, holding around 1000 songs, which was incredible at the time. Since then, Apple has led the surge of portable music players and music sold to be played on them via their Itunes website. In 2011, Itunes reached 15 billion song sales since it began. It has a catalogue of over 28 million tracks, and 300 million sales in October 2011 alone.
32% of the worldwide trade revenues in 2011 were for digital sales, which is a huge, huge amount compared to previous years. It's truly incredible how just a few years can make a difference to the music industry, but these figures really show how much all of this has moved online in recent years.
