5 Primitive Ways Entertainment Worked Before We Figured It All Out

5 You Needed a Live Person to Preview Your Music for You

Today, many people don’t buy music at all. They stream it for free, and if you do choose to buy an album, you can listen to it in full for free beforehand. Earlier, you might have heard a song on the radio before going out and buying your own copy, or a music store might have let you listen to records before buying them.

But let’s now go way back, to before streaming and even to before phonograph records. People still bought music, in the form of sheet music that they could play themselves on a home piano. We refer to this as the era before “recorded music,” but sheet music was also recorded music, in its own way. If you read sheet music fluently, you could know what you were buying just by glancing at the page. And if you didn’t, stores had a solution for you: song pluggers. 

Song pluggers were live musicians who worked in department stores and played music so you knew what it sounded like before purchasing. They’d play various tunes on their own during the day, and then when you wanted to preview some sheet music, you’d tell the staff, who’d pass the sheet along to the plugger to play it for you.

This was a fine way for musicians to make a living, and famous composers like George Gershwin worked as pluggers. When the job became obsolete, pluggers shifted to performing sheet music to pitch other people's new compositions to publishers. That might be how the word “plug” came to mean “advertise.” 

4 Video Games, on Film

Here’s a question for you: What did video games use for graphics, before they were able to generate graphics themselves?

If you answered “text,” that’s a good guess (computer games used to print text even before computers had monitors), but we were asking about images, not text. If you answered “with dots moving on an oscilloscope,” that’s also a good guess, but we aren’t sure those qualify as images either. 

Instead of either or those, let’s look at the year 1974. Previously, arcades had used mechanical games like pinball machines, and Space Invaders and Pac-Man were still years away. Into this climate, Nintendo introduced a game called Wild Gunman. You shot at gunslingers, using a light gun. But rather than video footage (which had not been invented yet) or physical targets, you shot at film — a motion picture, projected from 16 mm film. 

This style of video game, in which you watch prerecorded footage, would later be known as “full motion video,” once video was invented. And the concept of responding to cinematics instead of to truly interactive elements lives on today in video games. We now call that “quick-time events.” 

3 The Dedicated Sound Effects Keyboard

In the days before motion pictures used sound, theaters played music over silent pictures. This didn’t always come in the form of a human being hitting the keys of a piano. Sometimes, it came in the form of a piano roll, which was a roll of paper that you’d feed into a piano, which would play the music itself. We hadn’t quite mastered how to record audio signals, but we had figured out this way of recording music to play back automatically.

Some theaters went further. The American Fotoplayer was one of these self-playing pianos that accepted piano rolls, but it also offered a series of other controls, so someone could play sound effects. 

Push one pedal, and the Fotoplyer would play the sound of a train whistle. Push another, and it would play thunder or a phone ringing. 

This might remind you of those buttons that radio DJs would hit to play sound effects, but remember: Prerecorded audio hadn’t been invented yet. The Fotoplayer didn’t merely play sound effects. It produced sound effects, by blowing air through whistles and banging bells. And now we have ourselves a possible origin for another popular phrase: bells and whistles. 

2 Super Puppets

You can name one film offhand that used marionettes — Team America: World Police. That film based its style on Thunderbirds, a British show from the 1960s. 

But while Team America constantly poked fun at its own medium, with visible strings on the puppets and deliberately awkward movements, Thunderbirds and other shows like it were trying for something more. They used a technique called Supermarionation, where the lips of the puppets synced with the dialogue track electronically. 

There’s an alternate timeline where we spent the following decades tinkering ever more closely with marionettes, making the movements ever smoother and using latex faces that perfectly resembled human skin. But we had to put an end to it, for fear that these automatons would rise up and slay their creators.

1 Landline Livestreams

We started this article by referring to streaming as a relatively recent invention, but it has existed in various forms for far longer than any of us would think. The first music streaming service dates all the way back to 1893, when people would pay to hear live music piped into their homes over the telephone. 

However, paid streaming services go back even longer than music streaming. At the start of the previous decade, the French had a service called the Théâtrophone. People didn’t listen to 24/7 music, as they did with the later Telharmonium but instead listened to live theatrical productions. A theater would contain 80 telephone transmitters, and the broadcast would travel by via telephone to palaces, homes and public places like restaurants. 

The very first telephone, which worked just in Alexander Graham Bell’s lab, was invented in 1876, but they already had the Théâtrophone network up and running as early as 1881. If you were in somewhere public, listening for five minutes cost 50 centimes. That was a little more than an hour’s wages, and it was considered cheap at the time, a special promotional price to draw in as many people as possible. 

Radio broadcasts made the Théâtrophone obsolete, because stuff could now be transmitted over wide areas wirelessly. The only problem, for the broadcasters, was that broadcasts could be picked up by anyone with the right device, without their paying anything. This launched the system of giving everything away for free and depending on advertising, which has remained in place across all media even today. 

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