Consumer music mediums have come a long way since Thomas Edison recited "Mary Had a Little Lamb" onto one of the first audio recordings ever. Since then, the method of what we use to listen to music has sometimes made extremely small, slow progressions, and other times it moves almost too fast to keep up with.
A grammaphone, or vinyl record, was the music medium of choice from the early 1900's up through the mid 1960's. When your favorite artist released their new album, you'd head on down to the record store and pick it up, take it home, and play it on your own record player. Even after other mediums became the most popular medium, records never fully went away, and are still frequently sold to audiophiles and music collectors. Some of the other technology you're about to read about was popular for a little while, then faded away completely when a new medium surpassed it in popularity.
Beginning in the late 60s, some music was released on a cartridge called Stereo 8, or an 8-track tape. 8-Tracks became very popular because consumers could listen to their favorite music in their cars. The 8-track was even developed in collaboration with the Ford Motor Company. The more compact and easier to transport 8-track was a consumer favorite. The 8-track remained popular until the late 70s, when cassette tapes became the medium of choice for the music buying public.
Cassettes started to gain popular in the early-mid 1970s, and were at their peak popularity during the 1980s. A cassette had the advantage of not only being a great way to listen to your favorite band's new music release, but eventually you could buy blank tapes, and copy and share music the music you either recorded off the radio, or got from a friend (using a dual cassette boom box). Cassettes were like a musical precursor to social media, because you could record a song off the radio, and then record another song you liked later, and so on, until the tape was full. Then you could share new music with your friends by trading tapes.
CDs, or compact discs, followed cassettes, and held on to be the most popular form of listening to new music releases during the 1990s through the beginning of the 2000s. Compact discs offered by audio quality and longer play time (80 minutes vs. 60 minutes) than the average cassette. Audio equipment continued to improve, and soon cars were coming standard with CD players instead of cassette players.
Of course, following the success of compact discs and CD players is the mp3 and mp3 player. CDs are still around, and are still the second most popular format of listening to music, but with the introduction of mp3 players, the popularity of the iPod (which debuted in 2001),and the iTunes and Amazon digital music store, CDs will probably remain a second place technology.
The latest development in the music medium is the cloud movement. "The Cloud," in the context of the internet, is an offsite storage that houses data. For instance, if you saved something to the cloud, it would not reside on your machine, but on a server in a large warehouse in another state. The big three tech heavy-hitters Google, Amazon, and Apple all have a cloud based music option. The future of music could look very much like having a device that is constantly connected to the web (and thus, to the cloud), and you, the user, can stream music from a large library of music. This technology exists now, but most people still sync their mp3 player with a computer. Cloud music technology is in its infancy as far as how it relates to consumers, as cloud streaming music debuted from Amazon, Google and Apple in 2011.
Where is music headed next? Wireless headphones that connect to the cloud and stream music based solely voice commands? The possibilities are truly endless. Who, in the days of the vinyl record, could have predicted compact disc, or even cloud based music technology? It will be interesting to see where we will end up next as technology continues to mature and make leaps forward much quicker than it ever has before.
Sean Markey is a teacher and a musician in Salt Lake City, UT. He runs a website that allows users to stay up to date with every new music release and read reviews of the newest music.
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