“It is difficult to envisage a world in which every recording was practically unique: popular recordings are defined by their reproducibility.” Yet, in the early days of Edison’s phonograph and Eldridge Johnson’s gramophone, had become good enough to be sold for home entertainment, “no reliable and commercially viable method for duplicating recordings was developed. For about ten years, most recordings released commercially were one-off items.” Music historian Eva Moreda RodrÃguez recounts some of the ingenious (and not) ways that record companies handled that limitation.