During a brief spell in hospital last year recuperating
from a badly broken leg, and the insertion of more metalwork than I really want
into my body, a good mate of mine gave me an iPod to help pass the time. This
re-Kindle-d (yes, I know, very funny) my interest in music which had become a
bit distracted in recent years.
Lying in my bed I was able to ponder on how the music
industry had changed since I first developed an interest. We were never a
musical family and the first record player brought into our home was the one
which I purchased a couple of months after starting my first job in 1979. That
took the form of a small Technics amplifier and
turntable coupled with a pair of Wharfedale speakers, and my first LP
was George Benson's “Weekend in LA”. Bob Fosse’s movie “All That Jazz” was on
the circuit at the time and I really liked Benson's rendition of “On Broadway”
which featured in the soundtrack.
The mathematicians amongst us will have calculated the
period between my initial interest and today to be 35 years, and in that time
we evolved from records and cassette tapes, through to CDs and DVDs, and
finally digital files such as MP3s and WAVs. What makes us unique, and I refer
to my age group, or the generation born in the late 1950s to early 1960s, is
that we were witness first hand to all of these formats. We have seen each one
of the formats in their development stages, at their peak, and in their
declines. No other generation has had that opportunity.
We have all probably owned examples of each of the
formats, and of course the necessary hardware to play them. In the late 1980s I
had what one could call a complete system, that is to say a record player, a
tape deck (which had an auto rotate feature), a CD player plus an FM radio
unit. I used to enjoy “loading up” the whole system with a record, tape and CD,
and being able to listen to more than two hours of uninterrupted music before
needing to delve into the music collection for a refresh.
The next generation of music enthusiasts, those born in
the late 1970s and early 1980s, mostly skipped records and cassette tapes and
started out with CDs and DVDs. When we bought our first records and cassette
tapes the concept of a CD would have been completely foreign and unimaginable.
An entire album on one side of a disc smaller than a side plate?! Pffft! Never!
When the CDs first appeared in the 1980s they caused a revolution in the
industry. I purchased my first one from a local privateer, Pink Floyd's “Dark
Side of the Moon” for a whole R30, which we all agreed would reduce
considerably as the format became more popular. Yeah, right! We could hardly have imagined that a little
over 20 years later not only would the costs increase by more than 500%, but
that the format itself would all but disappear.
Those born in the 1990s will probably have little or no
exposure to any of the previous music recording formats. Theirs is the digital
age where music is “virtual“, an invisible file, nothing physical, breakable,
stretchable or scratchable! Everything
is held on a flash drive which resides either in a dedicated music player, a
mobile phone, laptop or computer. Of course invisible files also tend to have
invisible prices, and can be copied, shared, edited and modified at will. This
has led to another revolution in the industry which is still being dealt with
to this day.
So what has this got to do with disability I hear you
ask….. well, nothing….. except that running parallel with this revolution of music
formats was another revolution in terms of how we listened to it. The record
format, and the hardware required to play it, was not particularly portable,
resulting in record players being primarily located within a building, normally
one’s home. In order to enjoy your music you had to be in that building (at
home) and along with that came restrictions of having to share it with whoever
also occupied the building. A set of headphones offered some privacy with your
music but this was always at the end of a very restrictive cord.
With the development of the cassette tape everything
changed again and music began to develop legs and become portable. Initially
the large rectangular tape decks were as restricted as their turntable
counterparts but in the 1970s came cassette decks in motorcars, the infamous
ghetto blaster, and the Sony Walkman. Suddenly you could take your music with
you. There were of course new issues to deal with, most notably battery life
and many a good beach party was terminated when the ghetto blaster ran out of
juice. Their drive mechanisms were complex and prone to breakage, and tapes
stretched, especially when exposed to the heat of a car or the warmth of the
summer sun.
The Walkman really was a game changer, and created a new
concept in music listening, namely that one could enjoy it alone, even when
surrounded by others. It became an intensely personal form of musical pleasure
which one could enjoy on foot, in a bus or train, or in the workplace without
impacting anyone else.
The digital age brought about the ultimate
personalisation of music, continuing and refining the personal nature of the
Walkman, but adding a further enhancement through the ability to choose
individual songs rather than entire albums. This coupled with an enormous
storage capacity and a huge improvement in battery life has produced the
ultimate personal music machine, and one which is ideally suited to those of us
with limited physical ability. We no longer have to try and juggle with record
covers and album sleeves, turntable domes and tone arms after every half a
dozen tracks. No more trying to prise open compact cassette and CD crystal
cases every 45 minutes. Our music, all of our music, is now just a soft button
touch away on a smartphone or iPod. It doesn't get more accessible than that.
