INTRODUCTION 215
I. PHONOGRAPH RECORDS 216
II. RADIO 223
III. HOME TAPING 230
IV. DIGITAL FILES 236
V. INTERACTIVE STREAMING 244
VI. USER-GENERATED CONTENT SERVICES 250
CONCLUSION 257

It is a truism that the law takes a long time to catch up with technology. Just how long does it take? This article measures the length of time it has taken for copyright law to catch up to a series of six technologies introduced since the beginning of the 20th century that enabled new ways of distributing music to the public, and in doing so, last disrupted the music industry. For each such technology, we establish a timeline that starts when the pieces came together for that technology to become a mass medium for music distribution and ends with the last significant legal development that affected that technology. Such analysis may be useful in predicting the impact that the latest disruptive technology, generative AI, may have on creative industries. We show that the length of time for copyright law to resolve itself around these disruptive technologies has generally decreased over time, though only up to a point: the minimum has been 8 years, or longer if one looks outside of the United States.

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