The 10" 78rpm record was introduced in 1901 and was the first time music was available for home consumption, and on-demand. Though initially just a novelty, the music industry became commercially viable after Al Jolson's recording of Swanee and the release of the first ever talking motion picture, The Jazz Singer in 1927.

The 78 was a long-player format developed for commercial use by RCA in 1931 to encourage investment in the record industry. Intended for the radio industry as a storage format to enable material to be recorded and distributed freely between stations, the 78 was originally used in the USA to store and broadcast commercials, and was accepted internationally - it was used by the BBC to distribute programmes to other branches of the station world-wide.

The domestic launch of the 78 was hindered by its poor sound quality that seemed to worsen towards the centre of the disc, and also suffered from too much emphasis on the bass frequencies. By 1935, equalisation techniques had vastly improved and the format was manufactured as unbreakable disks made of plastic-coated metal that contained up to 15 minutes of audio each side.

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