“Trivial details illuminate the course of control through the distributing agencies. Forty years ago you could have records sent home to you on approval, in line with the customs of a liberalism which formally, at least, respected the customer’s taste. Today you find the more expensive albums citing copyright laws and the like in order to keep the stores from furnishing them on approval: ‘Sales conditions for Germany: Rerecording our records as well as recording broadcast of our records on tape or wire, even for private use, is forbidden. To avoid rerecordings without permission, dealers are not allowed to loan, rent, or furnish records on approval.’ The possibility of abuses cannot even be denied; the worst can now almost always cite irrefutable reasons – they are the medium in which evil becomes reality. In any case the pig must be bought in a poke, for listening to records in the poorly insulated cells of stores is a farce. Complementing it is the maxim that the customer is king because he can enjoy Bruckner’s entire Seventh Symphony in the privacy of his home. Whether such tendencies will change with market conditions remains to be seen.”

(Theodor Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music (1962), p. 201.)