The outpouring of new recordings prompted by tape and the LP (and, in pop music, the 45) makes it easy to overlook the fact that, in many ways, the new formats were limiting forces. They gave control of the market to big companies, which licensed the formats to smaller companies. They crowded out “amateur” performers and raised the bar for “professional” ones. They placed the responsibility for choosing which music would be recorded and made public with record-company executives, many of whom had extramusical motives in the front of their minds. And they proved so attractive that they drove the existing format — the 78 — into oblivion, and, with it, the thousands of recordings that existed only as 78s. This would be the pattern of progress for recordings in the postwar period. The new formats were advanced forms of mechanical memory, and they entered experience into the record with ever greater fidelity. Yet they were not means of revival so much as of forgetting.