Phonograph cylinders were the earliest medium for recording and reproducing sound. Commonly known simply as "records" in their era of greatest popularity (c. 1888–1915), these cylinder shaped objects had an audio recording engraved on the outside surface which could be reproduced when the cylinder was played on a mechanical phonograph. The competing disc-shaped gramophone record system triumphed in the marketplace to become the dominant commercial audio medium in the 1910s, and commercial mass production of phonograph cylinders ended in 1929.

Cylinders were sold in cardboard tubes, with cardboard lids at each end. These containers helped to protect the recordings. These containers and the shape of the cylinders (together with the "tinny" sound of early records compared to live music) prompted bandleader John Philip Sousa to deride the records as canned music (though that did not stop him recording on cylinders).

Cylinder recordings continued to compete with the growing disc record market into the 1910s, when discs won the commercial battle. In that decade Columbia (which had been making both discs and cylinders) switched exclusively to discs, and Edison started marketing their own disc records. However Edison continued to sell new cylinder records to consumers with cylinder phonograph machines through 1929. The latest of the new cylinders were simply dubs of disc records, and as such are of lower fidelity than the disc versions.

Cylinder records are once again being manufactured but out of modern long lasting materials. The Vulcan Cylinder Record Company of Sheffield, England currently boasts nearly two dozen titles in both 2 and 4 minute sizes, mostly dubs from original material but also some recent acoustic recordings

42 cylinder recordings (in MP3 format) all on 1 data CD!