Page "Phonograph" Paragraph 43

By 1890, record manufacturers had begun using a rudimentary duplication process to mass-produce their product.

While the live performers recorded the master phonograph, up to ten tubes led to blank cylinders in other phonographs.

Until this development, each record had to be custom-made.

Before long, a more advanced pantograph-based process made it possible to simultaneously produce 90 – 150 copies of each record.

However, as demand for certain records grew, popular artists still needed to re-record and re-re-record their songs.

Reportedly, the medium's first major African-American star George Washington Johnson was obliged to perform his " The Laughing Song " ( or the separate " Laughing Coon ") literally thousands of times in a studio during his recording career.

Sometimes he would sing " The Laughing Song " more than fifty times in a day, at twenty cents per rendition.

( The average price of a single cylinder in the mid-1890s was about fifty cents.