Wu-Tang Clan, The Beatles, And Elvis Presley Are The Creators Of The Top Three Most Expensive Vinyl Records To Date

Get spinning on August 12th with National Vinyl Record Day! Whether it’s the Beatles, Elvis Presley, The Monkees, Johnny Cash or the BeeGees, vinyl records have a sound all their own. Most will agree, that vintage vinyl is as classic as the bands themselves.

• 1857 – the phonautograph was patented by Leon Scott. This used a stylus and vibrating diaphragm so that sound waves could be graphically recorded as tracings on sheets of paper.
• 1877 – The phonograph was then invented by Thomas Edison in 1877.
• 1889 – The first phonograph parlor opens, featuring a row of coin-operated phonographs.
• 1894 – 7 inch records were created
• 1901 – 10 inch records were created
• 1903 – 12 inch records were created
• 1909 – The very first collection to ever be referred to as an ‘album’ is Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker Suite,” released in April as a four-disc set by Odeon Records.
• 1925 – The standard record recording speed was 78 rpm.
• 1930’s – On-film “optical soundtracks” replaced the Vitaphone system for movies, but radio stations loved the new platform for music, so it became the standard in the audio industry.
• 1931 – The first long-playing record, pressed on flexible plastic discs, was introduced by RCA Victor (it was widely regarded as a failure).
• 1944 – Columbia Records released the first commercially available “microgroove plastic, 12-inch, 33-1/3 LP.” This new technology extended playback time to nearly 22 minutes and was much quieter than shellac. The dawn of the Age of Hi-Fi had come.
• 1948 – thanks to CBS the world’s first LP (Long Play) record is created. This vinyl record had a capacity of around 21 minutes per side and was 12 inches wide, playing at a speed of 33 1/3 RPM. This changed the face of the music industry to the album-centric format we all still abide by today.
• 1949 – RCA Victor introduced a 7-inch 45 rpm record with a hole in the center.
• 1950s – 1960s – Shellac 78 rpm records stopped being produced in favor of vinyl records.
• 1954 – The first Elvis song ever recorded was “That’s All Right/Blue Moon of Kentucky” in August 1954
• 1962 – The first cassette tape was invented by Phillips.
• 1967 – The best-selling album of 1967 was Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by the Beatles which sold 250,000 copies in the first week in the UK alone.
• 1969 – On September 26, The Beatles release arguably one of the most iconic album covers of all time, “Abbey Road.”
• 1977 – The Voyager Golden Records were included aboard both the Voyager I and Voyager II spacecraft that were launched into space in 1977. The records include sounds and images to introduce any would-be aliens to our civilization, here on earth. Tracks on the record include pieces by Mozart, Bach, and Beethoven, but they also have rock classic Johnny B Goode by Chuck Berry.
• 1982 – CDs (compact discs) became available to the public.
• 1991 – vinyl records left the mainstream.
• 2006 – vinyl record sales continue to increase according to Pitchfork.com. Even more dramatic sales started hitting the markets beginning in 2012
• 2015 – Wu-Tang Clan’s “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin” sold in 2015 for $2 million dollars, making it the most expensive record in history.
• 2016 – Fifty years later the best-selling vinyl album was Blurryface by Twenty-One Pilots which shifted 49,000 units. The fourth best-selling album in 2016 was The Beatles’ Abbey Road which moved 39,000 units.
• 2020 – more vinyl records were sold than CDs.
• When vinyl records first came on the market they had other names. Some of them were a gramophone record or a phonograph record. They are also called records for short. The analog sound storage medium consists of a flat disc. The sound is recorded by inscribing it on a modulated spiral groove.
• Depending on the speed at which the sound was recorded, the vinyl record will need to be played at a corresponding speed on the record player. This is referred to as rotational speed. The revolutions per minute (RPMs) of the more popular vinyls are:
  • 45s
  • 33 1/3
  • 78s
• Other features of vinyl records included reproductive accuracy or fidelity (High Fidelity or Hi-Fi, Orthophonic and Full-Range), their time capacity (long-playing or single), and the number of channels of audio provided (mono, stereo or quadraphonic).
• Vinyl records were also sold in different sizes such as:
  • 12 inch
  • 10 inch
  • 7 inch
• In fact, it was not until 2008 that phonautograms of speech and singing that were made by Scott in the 1860s were played back as sound!
• Shortly after, RCA Victor introduced their own LP, which turned at 45 RPM and was just 7 inches in size. These record formats are the very same that we use today, and that is once again growing in popularity.
• The World’s Biggest Vinyl Record Collection is owned by Brazillian businessman José Roberto Alves Freitas. At one point, his collection was said to be 8 million records strong
• Elvis Presley had a nice round total of 200 records counting singles, EPs and albums during his lifetime. That number could very easily have been doubled if he had not died at a young age.
• Elvis made 31 movies. 25 of these had either an EP or LP soundtrack recording issued with the same name as the movie.
• Elvis’s biggest hit was “Don’t Be Cruel”. A complex point system was devised to calculate each song depending on several factors such as length of time in the top 100 and a few other metrics and Don’t Be Cruel was number one followed by “All Shook Up”.
• Wu-Tang Clan, The Beatles, and Elvis Presley are the creators of the top three most expensive vinyl records to date.
• While they may look really cool, colored vinyl is proven to have a lower-quality sound than their black counterparts.

Sources:

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