long-playing record

But it took decades to realize the potential of spoken-word recordings, with help from technological innovations such as magnetic tape and the long-playing record, or LP, which enabled Caedmon — and competitors such as Listening Library and Spoken Arts — to record longer texts without interruption.

They acquired a long-playing record for that purpose, to no avail.

The long-playing record may have liberated music from the constraints of the three-minute or five-minute sides of 78-r.p.m. records, but, with each of its sides running well over twenty minutes, it had a paradoxical effect of turning music ambient—of turning, more or less, any record into background music for home use.

Like the vinyl long-playing record, the Polaroid camera and the manual typewriter, celluloid has attracted a generation of artists who have come of age in a digital world and have developed a nostalgic soft spot for analog.

And the long-playing record album is the opposite of moribund.