THE MUSICAL REVOLUTION

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.