The bandwidth (as we would call it nowadays) simply wasn’t wide enough to create a genuine streaming technology—certainly not with all the choices and options allowed by Internet platforms today. Music might very well be the most intangible of all art forms, but it still needs physical infrastructure to support its commercial aspirations. Given these constraints, even a small record collection gave music fans far more options than any radio or other available technology—at least until the late twentieth century.
But this didn’t stop people from trying other things, some of them quite strange.
This leads me to my favorite crazy music technology concept of the era. At the end of the 1930s, Seattle inventor Ken Shyvers launched a bizarre business out of a kind of studio bunker in the Pacific Northwest. Here a team of women worked late into the night with odd-looking machines combining the capabilities of a turntable, jukebox, and phone line.
The price was five cents per song. The input device looked like a small art deco cylinder, only 18 inches tall and easily fitting on a restaurant tabletop or bar counter. Many customers must have assumed these were some kind of mini-jukebox—except they offered a much wider range of song choices than any other competing technology.
The Multiphones (as they were called) allowed a selection of up to 300 tracks—and typically came with a list of around 170 options. The song choices were relayed to the female disk jockeys, who worked out of an available room in a drugstore at Fourth Street and Pacific Avenue in Bremerton. They would play the chosen track, which was broadcast back to the customer via a telephone line.
Bars and restaurants were the target market, but there was no reason why the concept couldn’t have spread to homes. The technology never gained national distribution, but thrived in Washington state, where it found a user base in Seattle, Tacoma, Spokane, and Bremerton. From 1939 to 1959, the Multiphone was not only a viable business, but anticipated many key aspects of the music distribution model of our own time.
We recognize many familiar ingredients here. No physical medium was required at the customer interface. A wide selection of songs was available for instant listening. Music choices were made by the user, not some corporation or station manager.
Why did it eventually fail? I fear that the Multiphone concept was too labor-intensive—requiring human intervention for each song played—and not very scalable. And though it offered a wider range of choices than a jukebox, the recordings suffered from poorer audio quality. The old-fashioned jukebox was, at that time, a simpler, easier concept.