Long before Netflix and Spotify, the film and music industries had developed forms of offering something for every taste. Early motion pictures and recorded sound have much more in common with current times than we might think: they were also on demand and favored niche culture. And all of this on a global scale. Flourishing cities in Latin America were among the first to receive imports of gramophones and film projectors in the 1890s, and host recording engineers and cameramen that traveled the world looking for images and sounds to fill the catalogs of the transnational studios and labels....