30 Years Ago In Time

Today record companies are trying to stave off the threat from downloading. But back in 1973, when TIME ran a cover story on POP RECORDS, the industry saw only platinum skies:

Life, metaphysicians of the record industry will tell you, is a super-monster smash; dig it. It is performed in an illogical world that is both flat and round, where 33 1/3 r.p.m. exerts a fearful centrifugal force. The U.S., particularly that extensive tribe of its citizenry under 30, is electronically in thrall to the thrumming, incessant sound of music, a phenomenon that has handed the record business a supremely marketable mania. Every week, hundreds of records are poured into radio stations by promoters trying to crack the crucial list of Top 40 hits that get saturation air play. Every year, 5,000 new albums pile up on endless racks in drugstores and supermarkets, there to await the ready purses of Mom and her affluent children. Last year, those purses responded to the galactic, 16-track, monster-smash tune of nearly $2 billion in records and tapes, making music, for the first measurable time in history, the most popular form of entertainment in America.
--TIME, Feb. 12, 1973