How personal music changed our lives

The boombox was ready, a fresh new cassette tape loaded you’d bought that afternoon. You’d just got the boombox for your 14th birthday last week. Now you’d be able to record the top songs you loved on tonight’s top 40! You just hoped the DJ wouldn’t talk over the start of the song or the end!

Today you can access millions of songs on your phone, portable MP3 player, laptop, tablet, and even stream from your car. Oh and you don’t own any of that music, you just rent it today. Although people still buy CDs and there’s a niche market of vinyl records and record players.

There was something special about those days of recording songs off the radio. The excitement of going to the record store and buying a 45 to build your collection. How maybe you even decorated some of your cassette mix tape holders.

Spending hours creating a mix tape of sad love songs from your recent breakup. You know, the one where you were sure you’d never ever love again. Until next month, which was like, forever anyway. Or your mix tapes for road trips or going for a run in the afternoon sun.

When the Sony Walkman came along in 1979, it was the start of a revolution in how we would own and listen to music. Those orange foam covers on the headset were a sort of status symbol. A social signal of who you wanted to be to the world. Much like the iconic white headphones for the iPhone became.

Then along came the CD and portable CD players, but those early ones, not so good for jogging or a workout until anti-skip technology came along. Slowly cassette tapes and all the pain of splicing a wrinkled tape that got caught in the spools, was replaced by “perfect sound forever” on CDs. No more fast forwarding or rewinding, just hit skip to the next song.

No more milk crates stuffed full of records. And no more record clubs where you just paid one cent for your first order, but hurry up so you can get next months shipment! But you also kind of liked going to Zellers or K-Mart to the music section with your friends on the weekend.

Today we just hop on an app on our phone and build our playlists in a few minutes. Run or workout a lot? There’s even special headphones for that so the buds don’t fall out of your ears. You can connect your phone to your car stereo wirelessly and yell at it to play that certain playlist when you drive. The music today lives in the aether, to be summoned at will.

In the days of our misspent youth we had to worry about batteries running out, scratches on our favourite records and even later, CDs. The pencil trick for rewinding a tape. Or the tape wearing down because you played it so much. And all bets were off if the tape jammed in your cars player!

As computers added more storage and became easier to use, suddenly we could transfer our CDs to our PCs. And burn playlists to a CD as well. Maybe making copies for friends and family. How we shared music began to change too.

Now we have subscription costs and well, we still kinda worry about battery life and where’s that charger anyway! Or being in WiFi or cellular data range if we haven’t downloaded the songs to our device.

For those of us in our 50’s and beyond, we’ve witnessed the biggest change in how we own and play music. From vinyl to tapes and 8-track to CDs and now on our devices and in the aether of the internet.

There is something perhaps that we will treasure in our memories. The feeling of vinyl and the pride of a record collection, the magic of cover art and even creating our own cover art. Where we felt inspired by the band or the musician to create something that expressed how we too, felt about that song or album.

There is something colder, more mechanical about how we store and manage our music today, a loss of an innocent, raucous and playful time. Yet at the same time, we can make playlists that run for days at a time if we want!

So here’s a nod to the days of perfect timing with our pinkies pushing down the record/play button at the start of that song. And the sigh of relief when the DJ didn’t speak over the intro and outro. The scratch of the needle as you placed it ever so carefully on the spinning turntable.