The Evolution of Music Listening

This week I have been thinking about my personal evolution of music listening habits. Part of this has been triggered by my problems with getting Spotify to play from my playlist instead of substituting recommended songs. Another part is due to the Thanksgiving holiday and the technological advancements I am thankful for.

I know this will date me but I remember getting a Sony Walkman for my 14th birthday. I wish I still had it because those things are worth a lot of money now but mine is long gone. When I got the device, I could listen to my favorite radio stations on either the AM or FM bands. It also included a cassette-tape player. My parents thoughtfully included Def Leppard's Pyromania tape with the gift as it happened to be my favorite album at that time. The tape player only had basic functionality and could not skip songs nor reverse back to the beginning of the song. Each side of the tape held 5 or 6 songs and when you finished one side, you flipped the tape over and listened to the other side.

Dual cassette boom boxes became all the rage so you could copy songs onto blank cassettes and create your own mix tape. That way if you only liked a few songs from a particular artist, you could fill a blank tape with a dozen or so of your favorite songs from different bands. I'm sure music companies hated those dual-cassette devices but it didn't take too many copies of copies for the music to start sounding ugly.

Next came the compact disc or CD. My oldest daughter never had a Walkman but she did have a Discman, which she loved. Like a cassette tape, the CD could only hold a dozen or so songs. Unlike the cassette though, you never had to flip it over as one side had the songs and the other had neatly silk-screened graphics. One feature the Discman had that the Walkman did not is the ability to randomly shuffle songs. Yes, it would pick one of a dozen random songs to play next. Talk about technological advancement.

The next evolutionary moment came from two new technologies: MP3 files and inexpensive hard drives. MP3 files are important because you could now squish an entire song that used to take around 33 to 65 MB of space down to 4 or 5 MB. That means you could fit a lot of songs on a fairly small hard drive that could be packaged into a personal-music device. 

I am a big fan of Sony and work for them. I also know how Sony lost their market lead for the personal-music-device market. They lost it by throwing their weight behind CD's and ignoring MP3 players. Why, because they also owned Sony Music and the lawyers didn't want to make copying music any easier. Remember that you can make as many copies of a digital song as you want and it will always play the same with no degradation in quality.

Apple seized on Sony's missed opportunity and created the iTunes store. You could now buy the listening rights to a single song and store it on your iPod and later your iPhone. Now it is almost impossible to find CD's any more. We also discovered that moving your music from one iPhone to another became a problem as Apple tried to limit sharing of music. There is still a way to do it but requires a little bit of technical knowledge.

Now everybody has moved to streaming music. Nobody buys a song any more. Instead we stream songs from our favorite service such as Apple Music, Spotify, Pandora, or Amazon Music. It is like we have gone back to listening to the radio but with much more control over the songs that get played. If you don't want to listen to meaningless advertisements, you can upgrade your streaming service and listen ad free.

Thinking about this evolutionary cycle, I have decided that I really don't like streaming music services and prefer going back to an MP3 music player. You have control over what songs you listen to and if you paid for them, don't have to continue to pay a monthly fee nor listen to those stupid ads. Then again I don't add to my music playlists very often. I have a set list and don't mind adding a single song a month for $1. If you are someone that changes the music listened to frequently, then you probably prefer a streaming service. I just happen to fit that demographic that doesn't.