Records and Tapes
Mood:  energetic
Now Playing: dailysourcecode
Topic: History
Records and Tapes. Records and Tapes. Or Cassettes and Vinyl?

These ancient analog data carriers are still amongst us, and heavily unappreciated by the internet, for these were the earliest forms of 'mobile content'.

It worked all beautifully together already and even extended itself straight into our cars and went with us on holidays. You bought a record, recorded it on a 90 minute TDK cassette, and you played it in your car or on any other cassette player for example at your friends house or even at your own birthday party. Not to mention the Walkman, which totally personalized the experience in 1980.

It didn't matter too much either if you'd lose the tape. You knew a friend got a hold of it, and he or she probably liked it enough to nick it from you. Or you were asked if they could 'borrow' it, and it was never returned again.

I have no idea of how many tapes I have lost track of in this way, but I do sometimes regretfully remember the same thing happening with many of my CD's, but at least not with my records.

And admittedly, of the 300 or so cassettes I own there are at least a dozen that I have no idea where these came from. Do you recoqnize this?

Heavily neglected by mass-media, our records and tapes have since the introduction of the CD been gaining more and more dust as they moved closer and closer to the upstairs attic, to be kept perhaps for future generations until someone decides to take it all to the fleemarket or even throw it away straight into the garbage, along with the memories, the hours of listening pleasure, even the love we felt for other people when listening to our favorite songs, as these sounds are typically soaked with personal memories.

What a shame. And what a waste of all the time invested in recording your favorite songs for in the car or for a friend, handwriting the songs onto the cover of the cassette, which even came with preprinted stickerlabels, a 'dolby' tickbox for quality control, and enough paper to write all the songs down. You promised yourself you'd buy the album.

Now to be seen as illegal copying activity, how common was it not also to sit next to your 'radio/cassette' player with your finger on the 'record' or the 'pause' button, trying to be quicker than the DJ?

A funny anecdote is that I already then tried to be quicker than Adam Curry, at that time broadcasting on Radio Decibel around Amsterdam, Holland. This is 24 years ago!

After recording my favorite songs off the radio on a cassette tape I'd go over to my friends party and play the tape all night long. If they liked the music they'd be more likely to buy the record. Don't conglomerates get this? And why is everybody calling podcasting a 'hype', when it delivers exactly the sharing experience that we so deeply miss when having to fork over cold hard cash for an electronic beep?

What an improvement we have made since those days. Almost a quarter of a century has gone by and we have invested billions of our own money into the 'music business', and what have they done with it? They have used it to 'digitize' every single note on the planet. Not that we asked for it, but when big music seemed so determined, some people went out and tried to help, wasn't that nice?

What we now have ended up with is what seems to be a million different digital distribution systems causing the entire music-loving community to become more fragmented than ever before and a lot of music has now effectively become unavailable to large parts of potential new audiences.

I also especially regret the loss of our common musical cultural inheritance that went lost with the introduction of the CD, meaning all the music made on records and tapes that was 'Lost in Digitization' and forever might be lost alltogether for future generations.

This is what I feel the Big Music Industry has done to us, the public, the consumer, the listener, the average joe. It took away 'audience-participation' in the 'records-and-tape-distribution-system', never to be looked back upon again. Now that is just plain silly.

I believe that we, the public and music consuming global audience, need to demand from the music industry that it re-create our musical consumption end-user-experience so that what we get at least back what we had already achieved in the 70's and 80's of the LAST centrury, which was the possibility to take the music we buy where we go (deliver by internet, phone line, cellular, cable, physical carrier), give us the legal right to share it with others for a small fee, and the right to make a copy for personal use (CD).

I don't think we, the audience, want to have our consumption patterns dictated by big music distributors. Our strength is in our numbers. We are with many, and we demand to decide for ourselves where and when and what we listen to.

As long as this is not in place, I'll stick with my records and tapes.