ABSTRACT
With the 1908 introduction of four-minute cylinders, the Edison Amberols, gearing of new phonographs (by Edison and others) was modified so that either the new records or the older two-minute cylinders could be played. (See table below.) Type/Name Letter/Year Letter/Year Name
Type/Name Letter/Year Letter/Year Name Leader BE 1906 BKT 1907 New Leader
Rapper, hip-hop impresario, founder of Bad Boy Entertainment. As difficult as it might be to keep track of Puff Daddy’s many name changes, it could be more daunting to trace his multifaceted career as creator and promoter of mid-1990s urban music. Like many other successful rap entrepreneurs, Combs was born to a middle-class family in suburban Mt. Vernon, New York, despite his bad-boy image. He began working as an A&R intern at Uptown Records in the early 1990s, but quickly showed himself to be a talented producer of rap and hip-hop recordings, launching the career of Mary J. Bilge. In 1993, he founded his own Bad Boy Entertainment company, in association with Clive Davis’s Arista label, a part of the Bertelsmann media conglomerate. (In early 2003, the relationship with Arista was ended; Combs is looking for a new distributor as of this writing.) Through the 1990s, he became a successful producer, working with top rap artists including The Notorious B.I.G., Faith Evans, and Total. In 1997, he launched his own career with the album No Way Out, which eventually sold more than 5 million copies; it won the Grammy for best rap album in 1998. However, his follow-up album, Forever, released in 1999, sold less than 1.5 million. Despite his prolific track record, or perhaps because of it, Puff Daddy came under some criticism for his heavy reliance on sampling rather than creating his own backing tracks.
