Music: Past Present
Posted: Mon Mar 02, 2009 5:37 am
The music industry has changed so much in the past years from the retail side of things that it is almost unbelievable.
When I was a teenager one of the things I loved to do was to go downtown and visit some of the big record stores and scroll through all of the new albums, looking for new artist or new albums. One thing that was important was the creativity of the album cover, I would something buy a record on the basis of the cover without even hearing what the music was like.
I use to by tape cassettes and spend hours mixing music and coming up with ‘fabulous’ tapes with the best music out there, I would even do mixes for people and provide them as Christmas gifts or birthday gifts, and they were well received. It was a hobby.
Then CD’s came along, and of course I was swept up with the clarity of sound, the amazement that all those songs were on one little disc. The different in size meant that they could be better stored as records took up so much space. Once you could start recording directly to CD’s the tape decks faded away.
In time, the records found themselves boxed up and remain up in the attic where I cannot bring myself to dispose of them (probably due to the memories attached to them). I still have a Beatles Abbey Road on the original Apple label.
The CD collection grew, not only getting new released, but replacing the classics albums that needed sound quality such as Dark Side of the Moon, Tales of Mystery and Imagination, Crime of the Century and many other fantastic albums re-released in CD format.
Now we are in the age of downloading, where MP3 & MP4 players allows you to carry around thousands of songs (and even the videos) on a nice little IPod or equivalent that does not skip, dosen’t jam up and if you want the latest release just plug it onto your computer and download.
Slowly the CD’s are being boxed up and are moving up to the attic next to the boxes of albums.
I love this new technology, and use it regularly, but some of the magic is gone (or being replaced).
My kids don’t ever go to music shops to brows, they have seldom listened to a full CD from beginning to end (except when they are in the car with me and I have the CD player going, but even now my car has an Aux for MP3 players, so they just want to plug in the little music boxes and listen to their mixes).
Some of the best songs I ever heard were not the commercial released songs from albums which got radio play, but were from the tracks on albums that were more than 3 minute long so never made commercial radio, or were just commercially enough for radio. If now a day’s only the commercial songs get downloaded, how do the other potential classics get found?
Saying that however, my kids often surprise me when I hear them singing something that I had no idea they ever heard of. A while back my daughter was singing a Billy Joel song from 52nd Street, I asked her ‘how do you know that?’, she said that she heard a song in a movie that she liked, youtubed it, saw it was some guy named Billy Joel, so she watched a bunch of his stuff on youtube and thought he was very good. She downloaded the stuff she likes and now has a number of Billy Joel classics on her IPod.
One of my daughter loves Mike Oldfield, purely from listening to his stuff on Youtube, and this guy would not be considered commercial.
So I realized that, nothing has changed in the core of things, just the method. Where I use to go into the shops browsing albums, kids these days somehow hear about an artist, or a song, they do their own browsing be it through youtube or other web based systems, and they end up doing it their own way.
So question:
Albums?
CD’s?
Or
Downloads?
What do you do prefer?
When I was a teenager one of the things I loved to do was to go downtown and visit some of the big record stores and scroll through all of the new albums, looking for new artist or new albums. One thing that was important was the creativity of the album cover, I would something buy a record on the basis of the cover without even hearing what the music was like.
I use to by tape cassettes and spend hours mixing music and coming up with ‘fabulous’ tapes with the best music out there, I would even do mixes for people and provide them as Christmas gifts or birthday gifts, and they were well received. It was a hobby.
Then CD’s came along, and of course I was swept up with the clarity of sound, the amazement that all those songs were on one little disc. The different in size meant that they could be better stored as records took up so much space. Once you could start recording directly to CD’s the tape decks faded away.
In time, the records found themselves boxed up and remain up in the attic where I cannot bring myself to dispose of them (probably due to the memories attached to them). I still have a Beatles Abbey Road on the original Apple label.
The CD collection grew, not only getting new released, but replacing the classics albums that needed sound quality such as Dark Side of the Moon, Tales of Mystery and Imagination, Crime of the Century and many other fantastic albums re-released in CD format.
Now we are in the age of downloading, where MP3 & MP4 players allows you to carry around thousands of songs (and even the videos) on a nice little IPod or equivalent that does not skip, dosen’t jam up and if you want the latest release just plug it onto your computer and download.
Slowly the CD’s are being boxed up and are moving up to the attic next to the boxes of albums.
I love this new technology, and use it regularly, but some of the magic is gone (or being replaced).
My kids don’t ever go to music shops to brows, they have seldom listened to a full CD from beginning to end (except when they are in the car with me and I have the CD player going, but even now my car has an Aux for MP3 players, so they just want to plug in the little music boxes and listen to their mixes).
Some of the best songs I ever heard were not the commercial released songs from albums which got radio play, but were from the tracks on albums that were more than 3 minute long so never made commercial radio, or were just commercially enough for radio. If now a day’s only the commercial songs get downloaded, how do the other potential classics get found?
Saying that however, my kids often surprise me when I hear them singing something that I had no idea they ever heard of. A while back my daughter was singing a Billy Joel song from 52nd Street, I asked her ‘how do you know that?’, she said that she heard a song in a movie that she liked, youtubed it, saw it was some guy named Billy Joel, so she watched a bunch of his stuff on youtube and thought he was very good. She downloaded the stuff she likes and now has a number of Billy Joel classics on her IPod.
One of my daughter loves Mike Oldfield, purely from listening to his stuff on Youtube, and this guy would not be considered commercial.
So I realized that, nothing has changed in the core of things, just the method. Where I use to go into the shops browsing albums, kids these days somehow hear about an artist, or a song, they do their own browsing be it through youtube or other web based systems, and they end up doing it their own way.
So question:
Albums?
CD’s?
Or
Downloads?
What do you do prefer?
