kartooner

Nap­ster, the infa­mous file-sharing soft­ware that folded a cou­ple years back (recently brought by to life by Roxio) stirred con­tro­versy with its busi­ness model; allow­ing the gen­eral pub­lic to swap files (music, movies and appli­ca­tions) for noth­ing. Truth be told in the early 1900s there existed a sim­i­lar ser­vice that allowed peo­ple to dis­trib­ute music over the tele­phone line.

“Wilm­ing­ton, Delaware, is enjoy­ing a novel ser­vice through the tele­phone exchange. Phono­graph music is sup­plied over the wires to those sub­scribers who sign up for the ser­vice. Attached to the wall near the tele­phone is a box con­tain­ing a spe­cial receiver, adapted to throw out a large vol­ume of sound into the room. A mega­phone may be attached when­ever ser­vice is to be given. The box is attached to the line wires by a bridged tap from the line cir­cuit. At the cen­tral office, the lines of musi­cal sub­scribers are tapped to a man­ual board attended by an oper­a­tor. A num­ber of phono­graphs are avail­able, and a rep­re­sen­ta­tive assort­ment of records kept on hand.

When plugged up to a phono­graph the subscriber’s line is auto­mat­i­cally made busy on the auto­matic switches with which the Wilm­ing­ton exchange is equipped. Sev­eral lines can be con­nected to the same machine at the same time, if more than one hap­pens to call for the same selection.

Each musi­cal sub­scriber is sup­plied with a spe­cial direc­tory giv­ing names and num­bers of records, and the call num­ber of the music depart­ment. When it is desired to enter­tain a party of friends, the user calls the music depart­ment and requests that a cer­tain num­ber be played. He releases and pro­ceeds to fix the mega­phone in posi­tion. At the same time the music oper­a­tor plugs up a free phono­graph to his line, slips on the record and starts the machine. At the con­clu­sion of the piece the con­nec­tion is pulled down, unless more per­for­mances have been requested.”

(source: http://earlyradiohistory.us/1909musi.htm)