The vinyl countdown: 75 years in, see how the LP changed the world

Rather than a few minutes, the disc could hold almost an hour of audio. But what really made vinyl click was a mix of timing, geography and clever engineering.

In June 1948, a small group of reporters and music industry insiders gathered at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel to hear about Columbia Records’ latest invention: the vinyl long-player.

Thanks to newly developed micro-groove techniques, this new disc — which spun at 33 and 1/3 revolutions per minute — could hold up to 25 minutes of music on one side, compared to the three to five minutes per side on the 78 rpm shellac discs that were in use at the