How Do You Consume Music?
Posted: Friday 27 May, 2011
Erica Whiteman
After a few discussions over the past week about the evolution of music media and the feature on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, where listeners can nominate their favourite 8 tracks they’d take to a deserted island, I started thinking about how we consume music.
From my earliest memories, I recall listening to oldies but goodies on an 8-track player in my mom’s Chevy Monte Carlo or sneaking listens to my dad’s coveted The Beatles records on the hi-fi. Then in my pre-teens, I dove head first into the earliest forms of music sharing – the mix tape. Every Sunday I would listen to Rick Dee’s Top 40 countdown and record my favorite songs off of the radio, singing along pretending I was a pop star and making up dance routines around my bedroom (queue Duran Duran’s View To A Kill). Fast-forward to a few years later and the CD was the music media of choice. I would create mix CDs of bands I loved and worked with for my friends.
Then high-speed broadband changed the way everyone consumed music. The generation after generation Y has never even owned a cassette tape, much less heard of 8 track cartridges. Everything is digital and kept either on a hard drive or in ‘the cloud’. Kids don’t get together to go record shopping anymore; they swap URLs or MP3s. With the evolution of social media, music is now found and consumed on the likes of Spotify, LastFM, Pandora and Radio Spotter. All of these music-streaming sites connect with Facebook, allowing users to share what they are listening to with their friend network.
I can’t keep up with all of the new music these days, thankfully with music streaming sites, I can transport myself back to the “good ol’ days” with songs from my youth. As Ferris Bueller once said, “Life moves pretty fast. You don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”
