33⅓ vs. 45: The Battle of the Speeds

On June 21, 1948, at a press event at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria, Columbia Records stacked a tower of 78s next to a slim pile of new discs holding the same music. The stack of 78s stood taller than a man. The new pile was fifteen inches high. Point made.

The long-playing record — 33⅓ revolutions per minute, pressed in quiet, flexible vinyl instead of hissing shellac — was the work of a Columbia team under Peter Goldmark, and it solved the oldest complaint in recorded music: the interruption. A Beethoven symphony on 78s meant getting up every four minutes to flip or change discs. The LP’s “microgroove,” roughly three times finer than a 78’s, held more than twenty minutes a side. For the first time, a listener could sit down and stay seated.

RCA answers with a very small record

Here the story turns operatic. Columbia offered to license the LP to its great rival, RCA Victor — whose chief, David Sarnoff, had been shown the technology and, by most accounts, did not enjoy being second. RCA declined, and in March 1949 fired back with its own format: a seven-inch disc spinning at 45 rpm, with a big one-and-a-half-inch center hole, built for a nimble changer that could drop a new disc in about a second. RCA even color-coded early 45s by genre — country in green, classical in red, popular in standard black.

The 45 held about the same amount of music as a 78 — which is to say, one song a side. As an album format it was faintly absurd: a symphony arrived as a boxed brick of little discs, plopping down one movement-slice at a time. But as a singles format, it was close to perfect: cheap to press, nearly indestructible in the mail, and light enough for a teenager’s wrist.

Two years of glorious confusion

For the consumer of 1949, this was chaos. Records now came in three speeds and three sizes, and the player on the sideboard likely handled only one of them. Many families simply stopped buying records until the dust settled — industry sales sagged noticeably that year, and newspapers ran explainers on which speed was “winning.” Turntable makers responded with the great diplomatic instrument of the age: the multi-speed changer, its selector clicking between 33, 45, and 78 like a gearshift.

The war ended not with a winner, but with a division of territory that would define music retail for forty years.

The sensible truce

By 1950, both giants blinked. RCA began pressing LPs; Columbia adopted the 45 for singles. The truce assigned each format the job it was born for: the LP became the home of the album — classical works, Broadway cast recordings, and eventually the rock-era statement album — while the 45 took the hit single, the jukebox, and the teenager’s allowance. The 78, elder statesman of the shellac age, faded from American pressing plants by the end of the 1950s.

Every collector alive has lived inside that truce. The album you savored end to end, the single you played until the groove turned gray — that division of listening was drawn up in boardrooms between 1948 and 1950 and never really repealed. Even today’s revival pressings ship at the same two speeds, with the same size holes, cut to the same microgroove geometry. The battle ended; the map it drew is still the map.