John Philip Sousa Feared ‘The Menace of Mechanical Music’ | Smart News| Smithsonian Magazine
Composer John Philip Sousa feared that record players and "mechanical music" would shift the culture from one where many people created music together in their homes to one where they stopped creating and just listened. His fears were right--we did shift to primarily consume media for decades. More recently, social media has let us shift back to having many people create and share. This is a bit of historical context for the shifts in culture around creation and consumption.
Sousa was concerned that recording would cause “social decline,” he writes, as people stopped making music together.