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Topic: 50000th 78!

11th Apr 2016, 3:38 AM
	xiphophilos Member since Dec 2013 3351 Points Moderator	There are definitely millions of individual 78 rpm records still out there. I myself own a bit more than a 1000 records, and 80% of these I had to add to this database because no prior entry existed. Now I wouldn't say that I own only rarities; on the contrary, most of my records are probably quite common. Based on this, I'd say that there are at least another 200,000 common records made in the US alone out there, and I'm sure that's still extremely lowballing it. Now if we consider that the market for 78s was far, far more international than it appears on this site, we get to millions and millions of records. Right now, we only have the tiniest of fractions of some country's record production in the database. To mention a particularly stark example, our database contains exactly one (1!) Chinese record (and 7 from Hongkong). As early as 1904, the Gramophone & Typewriter Company listed 476 Chinese titles in its catalogue. Columbia had made more than 1,000 Chinese-language records by 1906! The German Beka produced at least 500 Chinese records, the US company Victor thousands before World War II. And these are just four companies (for the numbers, cf. http://www.capsnews.org/apn2008-1.htm and https://excavatedshellac.com/2014/07/). One last example: The database contains 196 Indian records. According to the site http://www.mustrad.org.uk/articles/indcent.htm, more than 500,000 different gramophone record titles were issued in India alone. Edited by xiphophilos on 2nd Apr 2018, 2:51 AM