Picture this, you’re aimlessly turning the radio while your driving. Your skipping station to station from classical, talk radio, oldies, to today’s hits.
As you unconsciously continue to play with the radio, all of a sudden there it is! A song that catches your ear, puts you into a groove, a song you connect to. The song you were waiting for.
You turn it up real loud to rock out in your car, ignoring the stares and occasional giggles from people whizzing by. Right as you turn it up and you hear those sweet melodic lyrics, they begin to fade, no! There’s no Shazam app to listen to the song and determine the title and artist. There’s no smartphones to quickly type down the lyrics in an effort to track down the elusive song. The host didn’t even say what the song was after it was over. Why are they paying this guy?
So you’re stuck religiously playing that radio station day after day, hoping the same song that caught your ears will play again and relieve you from searching for that song and restore a portion of your sanity.
This is one of the many stories I can think of I had as a child, back in the CD age. I’m 22 years old now to put it into perspective. I’m sure people growing up in the ’90s have similar stories as well. We look back at CDs as such old technology, not realizing how big it was at the time and how spoiled we were. You can play music while you without a radio or a record player? I’m sure my grandfather was dumb-founded when he was first presented with a CD player. He probably thought, “They can make vinyls that small?”
My generation grew up in the middle of the internet boom and have been showered with technological advancements and enhancements in music. We used to think music is everywhere and now it really is, all you have to do is walk down your street.
There’s a kid walking down his street shuffling through his playlist. Another kid is listening to his friend’s song through sound-cloud. There’s another guy blasting classic rock from his radio.
Music is so much more accessible now. When we wanted to hear a different genre of music we would hope we had a CD of it or constantly fiddled with the radio dial. Now we can go from Bob Dylan’s set list from Newport Festival in the 60’s to today’s top hits.
Even my cousin who grew up in the ’90s said it was much more different. When CD was the main platform for music, you really had to take a wild guess if you wanted to listen to a new artist. If you’ve never heard of them before it would be hard to sample the music.
Now we can meticulously pick which songs we want from a certain artist or album we like.
Within the past 15 years the platform has changed dramatically causing businesses to quickly work on shaping their business around the new model making hard copies irrelevant and digital copies priority. This internet has changed how we deliver music, with developments of streaming sites like Spotify. Spotify has come under fire from artists due to the small amount of money accrued.
Internet radio exposes people to artists they would have never had the chance to hear otherwise. With almost infinite access to music you hear artists today who are influenced by different genres throughout the years.
This also leads to a lot of pirating. As easy as it is to buy all your music, it’s just as easy to download all the music you want illegally. This has also forced businesses to conform to consumers and create a business model that would deter illegal downloading in an age where it feels like the wild wild west.
Now if your in the car, you can hear a song, look up the artist, and play any music from any album that artist has. Now imagine what will happen in the next 20 years.
-Brandon Peddle
Passion and Beats 