The LP Decade

An indiscriminate listener with brass ears, plenty of time on his hands and a normal yen for sleep, could sit down ber fore his hi-fi set and work through the whole literature of LP-recorded sound (as far as generally available in the U.S.) in roughly 3 1/2 years. To keep him up to date, he would want a 204-page catalog published monthly by William Schwann of Boston. In the ten years since LPs started flooding the market, the Schwann Long Playing Record Catalog has become a fascinating indication of music consumption in the vinyl era. Last week, as his 100th catalog was being mailed out to 4,000 record shops in the U.S. and 37 foreign countries, Cataloger Schwann took a statistical look at the musical revolution that keeps him in business. Some of his assorted findings:

P: The first Schwann Catalog contained eleven record-company labels, 96 composers, 674 listings; the current issue contains 303 labels, 718 composers, 19,830 listings.

P: Only a fifth of the serious composers listed in the original catalog were contemporary; today nearly half are contemporary, a quarter of them American.

P: The largest numerical growth has come from reworkings of the middle classical range (1700 to 1900). Mozart (868 listings), Beethoven (865), Bach (650), Tchaikovsky (341) and Brahms (319) are the most over-recorded names in the book. CJ LPs become obsolete fast. A third of the recordings spawned in the early years of the vinyl decade are no longer on the market.

P: The Schwann Catalog grows at the rate of as many as 400 listings a month. If the growth keeps on accelerating, the brass-eared listener will soon have to give up his sleep to get to the bottom of the pile.

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