subject: Modern Music Technology And Other Musings [print this page] Was there ever really a time in our recent history when we couldn't get any song that we wanted loaded onto our personal music player within a matter of minutes? My children might think I am talking about ancient history, the dark ages, if you will. However, it really wasn't that long ago that you actually had to buy an entire album (gasp!), if you wanted to hear a song. Or, better yet, sit by your radio for hours on end in the hopes that you might actually hear that one song you've been dying to listen to.
How did we do it? How did we actually survive the desperate struggle to find good music? How do we not have lingering emotional scars from the time and effort it took to track down songs we wanted to hear? Human resilience, my friend, human resilience. That, and the fact that we didn't know what we were missing. We didn't know that within our lifetimes, we would have iPods the size of small packs of gum with hundreds of our favorite songs for our listening pleasure.
In my lifetime, I remember switching from 8 track tapes to cassette tapes. I remember hearing my parents and their friends talking about how the music industry couldn't do this to people! They can't expect everyone to go and buy all of their favorite albums all over, again, just so they can hear them on cassette tape. Preposterous! Yet, everyone did, and they seemed to have survived okay. After that, when cd's were introduced, I heard that same complaints from my older siblings and their friends. They were also pretty certain that this compact disc thing was just a fad, and everything would go back to cassette tape soon enough. It didn't. We all made it through with barely even a scratch for all of our troubles.
Are cd's on their way out, as well? When everyone can download music directly onto their cell-phones, iPods and laptops, it's possible. Anything is possible with the rate at which technology is developed. Maybe, someday in our future, we will simply have a chip implanted in our eardrum with all of our favorite music on it, and it can be controlled with a tiny little remote implanted into the pads of our thumbs. Who knows? Until then, I am grateful that we have gone from the days if homemade mixed tapes with songs recorded straight from the radio, to professional, new mixtapes with singles from any artist you can think of, including some that haven't even been signed with a label, yet. That, and peanut butter m&m's. I'm always thankful for those.
