“It’s very strange,” Victor Hugo wrote. “It starts with two ear muffs on the wall, and we hear the opera; we change earmuffs and hear the French Theatre, Coquelin.” He added that the children and he were delighted. This was Paris in the years after 1881, and Hugo was trying out what Open Culture calls the first music streaming service.
Opera down the telephone line
The French inventor Clement Ader built the Théâtrophone around very sensitive microphones of his own design. It relayed theatre and opera over phone lines to headphones, and because each ear got a slightly different signal, listeners heard a stereo effect. Pittsburgh Magazine dates its debut to the 1881 International Exposition of Electricity in Paris, with a working subscription service in the city by 1890. An 1889 edition of The Electrical Engineer reference guide defined it as a telephone that delivered “soupçons of theatrical declamation for half a franc”.
Others followed. In Budapest, Tivadar Puskas ran a service called Telefon Hirmondo that sent news and stock market information down the wires, and subscribers could call the switchboard and pick their broadcast. London’s Electrophone, formed in 1884, mixed news with music and let users talk to the central office to request programs. It was not cheap: £5 a year, a sum that would have covered a couple of months of rent. The commercial model did not hold. According to Open Culture, radio killed off the venture in the 1920s, with its universal reach and its appeal to advertisers and governments.
A jukebox network in Pittsburgh
The idea refused to die. In Pittsburgh, a business called Telephone Music Service wired jukeboxes in bars to a studio. A customer fed money into the machine, lifted a telephone attached to its side, and gave an operator a request. The song then played through the jukebox.
Nobody agrees on exactly when it began. Helen Reutzel, the owner before White, told several versions. In one, her father built the original system in 1929 and it grew to 120 establishments in several states. The more plausible account, Pittsburgh Magazine says, is that her father, Bill Purse, bought the business in 1946, when about two dozen Pittsburgh bars subscribed. A woman named Penny McGough began spinning records for it in 1942 and kept at it six nights a week, 9 p.m. to 2 a.m., for 35 years.
By the 1990s the studio held more than 200,000 selections, filed by hand. “20 seconds and we could find a song,” said Dotti White, who took over in 1988 when only six bars remained. “And nothing was computerized.”
Why it closed
Costs did the damage. Phone lines got pricier: after the Bell breakup, White said, an installation cost $2,000, against about $250 before. The city also pressed for permits of roughly $2,000 for each jukebox, and she says she was often in court over it. She shut the service around 1997 or 1998, though she is not sure which.
The word “streaming” itself did not arrive until the early 1990s, when it described video on demand. YouTube launched in 2005, Netflix opened its streaming platform in 2007, and Spotify reached the United States in 2011, the same year Twitch started.
Sources
- Did You Know Music Streaming Has Roots in Pittsburgh? (Pittsburgh Magazine, Zack Furness)
- The First Music Streaming Service Was Invented in 1881: Discover the Théâtrophone (Open Culture, Josh Jones)
- A Brief History of Streaming (Instreamly)
