In the twentieth century, records and record players were employed as the media and medium of art and music. These generative practices sought to extend the possibilities for sound production, at times ending in the destruction of both vinyl and turntable—what I call cracked media. Artists allowed records to be scratched and scuffed (Christian Marclay’s Record Without a Cover, 1985), sliced and reformed discs into new compositions (Milan Knížák’s Broken Music, 1963–), and destroyed the turntables themselves to create new instruments (Otomo Yoshihide). Much of this work occurred because the media was accessible, cheap, and commonplace. In the 1990s, however, vinyl records were superseded by compact discs, and by the 2000s digital file formats such as MP3 had become the most common form of music distribution.