A Condensed Evolution of Music Media
I was at a friend’s house the other day and I noticed that there were no music CDs anywhere that I could see anyway. I thought this was strange because you can usually find people’s music collections pretty easily. I asked her where she kept her CDs and she told me that she didn’t have any anymore. Imagine my shock! She explained that she didn’t feel a need to keep them because she has everything on her iPod. While I can understand the convenience and appeal of keeping your music digitally; I can’t help but wonder what she would do if her hard drive ever crashed. Could you imagine the devastation?!? I wouldn’t even want to go through that.
Anyway, I was thinking about the fact that she no longer owned any CDs and I guess it’s normal to replace the old with the new, right? I mean, CDs took the place of casette tapes. Thank goodness for that! Cassette tapes were cool when they worked properly and you could record your own mixes and all, but what about when the tape player ate them. Eeee gads! That was heart breaking! Of course, you can make your own mixes on CD and then they get scratched up. That’s fun. I guess nothing’s fool proof or perfect, right?
Before CDs, we had vinyl records. I didn’t own many, but I did have a few when I was young. I used to hate the sound of the needle scratching the record. It was like nails on a chalk board (not exactly music to your ears). Prior to that, people relied on 8-Tracks for their listening pleasure. I have never used an 8-Track, but from what I understand you could listen to the album straight through or you could skip around randomly, but you couldn’t control where you’d land in the album. I guess it was a bit like using the "random" selector on your CD player.
Before the 8-Track, there were reel-to-reel tapes. I remember my Dad had one of these when I was growing up. It just sat on a shelf and collected dust. I thought it was for movies, but I found out later that it was for music.
The point of all this is that technology is always changing and the new stuff pushes out the old in order to give you a better experience. I know people who have extensive vinyl collections that have not been updated to today’s technology. I don’t know that they ever will be, but it will be interesting to see what happens to those collections as technology marches on. I wonder what will come next? Any ideas???
Happy Listening/Searching/Shopping,
Payton
