When I was very young, my parents were still listening to 8-track tapes (gigantic tapes the size of 3 CD cases stacked on top of each other with 8 songs on them) and had a no-longer-used collection of records. At this time, cassette tapes had begun to make their debut, and that is primarily what I listened to until I became a teenager. Cassette tapes were the size of a deck of cards cut in half. If you were lucky, you had a Walkman, which weighed like 5 pounds and used batteries (the kind you replace, not charge in the wall). You had enormous headphones, only one person could hear it at a time, and you could only play one tape at a time. If you wanted to re-wind, you had to wait a minute for the process to occur. If you wanted to skip some songs, you had to wait for the fast-forwarding to take place. There was no picking a track for quick playback. Of course, there was the conventional plug-in-the-wall device that played tapes. Sometimes you were lucky enough to have a dual-cassette player, which you could insert two tapes in at one time!
Seeing as the cassette had different recordings on each side, in the middle of the set of tracks, you had to flip the tape over to the other side. You had to be careful not to catch the actual tape inside of the cassette on anything because it would unravel, and you would have to patiently wind it back up with a pencil. Fun, fun…
If you wanted a free copy of a song, you could always record it from the radio, which took lots of time. You would sit and wait for hours listening to the radio. You would recognize your song after a few seconds, then press the record and play buttons at the same time. The beginning of the song was almost always cut off, but you wouldn’t care much. That’s just the way it was.
If you had a boyfriend/girlfriend, the cool thing to do was to make a mix tape for them of either your favorite songs or theirs. Sometimes you just wanted a certain collection of songs, kind of like the playlist of today. This could take a while, seeing as you had to collect all of the tapes that you wanted to record from. Then, you would re-wind or fast-forward to the song that you wanted from each tape. You had to have a dual cassette player because you recorded from the already recorded tape to a blank one. Then, you sat and waited until each song played all the way through. You had to be careful to stop the blank tape each time, or you would waste precious tape time with recorded silence. You would eject each tape and repeat the process until all songs were recorded.
Then, around the beginning of my teenager years, they came out with a CD (compact disc). Everybody thought this was the coolest thing since sliced bread. When using your CD player (which sometimes would hold 5 CDs at a time), you could skip songs. You no longer had to wait on re-winding and fast-forwarding. The biggest problem was figuring out what to do with all of the cassette tapes that had been accumulated. Most people still played them in their cars because most people didn't have new cars with the latest technology.
CDs often skipped a beat if the player was jostled or if there was some kind of scratch or smudge on the bottom of the disc. If you scratched your CD, the affected song would be damaged forever. Sometimes, the scratch would ruin the whole CD, so you would just hang it from the rearview mirror from your car for decoration. Recording a CD was hopeless unless you had a computer, which most people didn’t until about 5 years later. At that time, you were in limbo between cassette tapes and CDs because you still enjoyed listening to exactly what you wanted so you’d revert back to home-recorded tapes. The good thing about CDs is that they were much more portable. You could fit several into the same space two cassettes would take up.
About 5 years ago, mp3s became popular. This is now life as you know it. You can download whatever you want, whenever you want and put it together however you want. If you want just one song, you don’t have to buy the whole record. Playlists (mix tapes of old) can be assembled in the snap of a finger. If you want to burn a CD, that takes just a couple more seconds. Usually, you just hook your mp3 player into your computer and sync it. Most people have every song they own in a program on the computer and can access all of their music at one time. Your mp3 player can hold tons of music and can be played as quickly as you want.
While looking back on my youth, I realize how much time is saved these days. Listening to music could be such a process back then. At least having gone through all of that evolution, I can truly appreciate the simplicity of musical entertainment today.
What will they think of next?...
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