The fifteenth century was one of the last eras of Western art music to make it onto recordings. Record companies are businesses, dependent on the marketplace, and the audience for medieval and Renaissance music in general has always been considerably smaller than that for all later periods. Recordings of fifteenth-century music thus first appeared rather late in the game, in the 1930s. Safford Cape, an American who moved to Belgium in 1925 to study music, abruptly abandoned a promising career as a composer in 1932 to devote himself to the performance of medieval and Renaissance music. Recordings of fifteenth-century music had expanded from presenting short individual works to massive collections devoted to a single seemingly esoteric subject. Most noticeably, the use of instruments in recordings of fifteenth-century sacred music has largely disappeared, whether the ensemble is from England, America, or Europe. Recordings of secular music have been more resistant to all-vocal renditions, especially those from Continental groups.