Nowadays, it's so easy to find music. You can just google any song (although it's probably better to use Spotify, YouTube Music, or another service. It can avoid some tricky copyright issues). However, it was not always so. Spotify didn't come to the US until 2011. Let me share with you some of the ways that I listened to music throughout my life.
Older media:
Vinyl records are making a comeback recently. I listened to them because they were cheap (I don't care about audio fidelity; I can't hear a difference). We also had some old 8 tracks laying around. Lots of John Denver and Peter, Paul, and Mary.
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| My mom was a little young to be a hippie, but she liked their music. |
Tapes:
Tapes were great: cheap (you would sometimes get them for free in Happy Meals), lightweight, portable, and most cars had a tape deck that you could play them in. You could also listen to them while exercising, thanks to Walkman.
One cool feature was the ability to make mixtapes. Using a tape player with recording capability, you could "save" you favorite songs from the radio. You just had to wait for them to come on. You could also copy one tape to another or transfer music from a record onto a tape. A lot of our tapes growing up had originally been records.
They weren't without issues:
- These were magnetic storage media, so you couldn't get them close to a magnet.
- Excessive heat was also bad.
- Sometimes, the tape player would "eat" the tape. You could use a pencil to fix it. If the tape broke, you could sometimes use a small piece of Scotch tape to temporarily fix it.
CDs:
Compact discs are great. Also, fairly portable and you could listen to them on your Walkman (although not while walking unless you had anti-skip technology)
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| So cool. |
Interesting piece of trivia. CDs hold around 74 minutes of music because when they were first being produced, a Sony executive wanted them to hold the entirety of Beethoven's 9th Symphony (which is around 74 minutes).
Napster:
Talk about thorny copyright issues. On Napster, you could pretty much download any song. Of course, you needed internet access, which I didn't have growing up (all we had was a service called Juno. It used dial up to download email into an inbox. We would read the messages, write responses, and send them to the outbox. Then we would dial in again and messages would be sent out). So what did I do if I wanted a song from The Phantom of the Opera? I would have to ask a friend. Problem was, he didn't have a CD burner (they weren't standard back then). An MP3 file was around 5 MB and a floppy disk only held 1.44 MB
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| They weren't really floppy. |
MP3 Players:
Smart phones have replaced many of the separate devices that we used to have: books, video games, GPS, and MP3 players. The early MP3 players came out in the late 1990s and could hold about 10 songs. The iPod appeared on the scene in 2001 and could hold 1,000! I wasn't fancy enough for that, so I had a Rio Cali.
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| Check out all its majesty! |
Now you may be asking how I filled up an MP3 player, if I was against downloading MP3s illegally. I don't know if you guys still do this, but there's a feature of computer audio players called "ripping". It takes music files from an audio CD and turns them into MP3s. Technically, this is legal (as long as you retain ownership of the original CDs). I was able to have all my Broadway cast albums and Enya tracks uploaded.
The Music Server:
One final way that I used to listen to music. I used to work at the Ellington Lab at UT when I was an undergrad. I'll have to post about that some day. It was a very formative time of my life. We had about 50 people working in the lab in the mid 2000s, which is a huge number. The internal lab computer network had a dedicated server that you could upload any music onto to share with the other lab mates. It gave you something to listen to at 2:00 AM when you were waiting for a gel to finish running. Probably not technically legal, but I got exposed to a lot of new artists that way.
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