Collections

The Library of Congress holds the nation's largest public collection of sound recordings (music and spoken word) and radio broadcasts, some 3.5 million recordings in all. Recordings represent over 110 years of sound recording history in nearly every sound recording format and cover a wide range of subjects and genres in considerable depth and breadth.

The collection includes over 500,000 LPs; 450,000 78-rpm discs; over 500,000 unpublished discs; 200,000 compact discs; 175,000 tape reels; 150,000 45-rpm discs; and 75,000 cassettes. Among the unusual formats in the collection are wires, instantaneous discs, cylinders, music box discs, rolls, bands, dictabelts, and Memovox discs.

The collection incudes most musical genres with particular strength in opera, chamber music, folk, jazz, musical theater, popular, and classical.

  • Digital Collections The Recorded Sound Research Center continues to digitize sound recordings including early commercial music now in the public domain, radio broadcasts, interview and other audio. The center regularly adds digitized content, as noted in the About the Collection section for each collection.