Author: Peter Muscutt
I was watching a Peter Kay stand-up DVD the other day, and laughing to myself about one point he made which hit straight on the head something many, if not all, youngsters used to do in the privacy of their bedrooms (no, not THAT) I am of course, talking about listening to the Top 40 and taping all your favourite songs. Short of pocket money, kids across the land would have their C-90's ready, fingers poised over the 'pause' button to stop the recording just as the DJ began talking, of course, despite even years of practise, we could never quite manage this, and always ended up with the latest Shaggy hit with a snippet of dialogue along the lines of "Number eight this week"!
This method of capturing all the latest chart hits on cassette was a favourite of mine, as well as a friend, mainly as we were responsible at one time for purchasing new music for the weekly school disco, a scam which involved snaffling the crisp tenner given to us by the Youth Centre Manager (the intention being for us to buy some CD singles or even a compilation album), then going home and recording the Top 40 for free on a Sunday night!
No matter how much of a brave face the music industry puts on, home taping/recording/copying has always been, and always will be, a part of every day life. I can't remember exactly the day someone uttered the words 'don't worry about buying that, I'll do you a CD' (with reference to CD burning technology) but chances are it was from internet auction site eBay that one was purchased. Of course, the sale of obviously pirated chart albums would be hit on fairly hard, but the opening on eBay existed for bootlegs - another staple of the home taping movement.
Live recordings which otherwise would never see the light of day could be experienced by fans, meaning another side to their favourite artists could be heard. Sound quality varied between sounding like the entire affair was recorded on a Dictaphone inside a dustbin from the back of the venue (which, to be fair, it probably was) to professional sounding full length concerts recorded, presumably, from the sound mixing desks at various gigs. However unofficial these were, however much income the bands involved missed out on, I still saw these bootlegs as a promotional tool - if you heard a good bootleg of a live performance, surely this made you want to actually experience the bands live firsthand and pay for a ticket?
And of course, then came the biggie - the internet download trend. Sites soon began to pop up all over the place, with file sharing options available, and the most well known, including Kazaa, Napster et al meaning free access to practically any bands and songs were available to all with an internet account. It will never be easy to put a number on the amount of people who download music, but CacheLogic, a Cambridge based firm, estimated as many as three billion songs exchanging hands online each and every day. The firm also comment that the big myth that the music industry is winning its war on music piracy and file sharing is incorrect - file sharers are simply moving to different programs and networks. The impact on file sharing and illegal music downloads has not been huge, around about 100 million songs less in the time between January and June this year.
The introduction of official 'pay-per-listen' sites such as Apple's iTunes, and a redeveloped Napster website may have helped to lessen illicit downloads, however the census appears to be that as long as people can get music online for free, wherever possible, they will - despite a huge crackdown on the most prolific file sharers.
This development in the methods of obtaining music also hits on the physical appearance of our own music collections - in the 80s we had vinyl and cassettes (cassette singles are now officially a thing of the past, due to practically non existent sales, vinyl however, continues as the format of choice for DJs and collectors). With the advent of CDs in the mid-80s, music collections were redefined, many people choosing to update their shelves full of bulky 12" vinyl with the smaller, sleeker CD format. To say that CDs may one day become obsolete is a little sensationalist, much as when internet shopping became a part of everyday life and the death of the traditional high street was rumoured! Certainly music is constantly adapting and changing, with the introduction of MP3 players such as the iPod, and while in years to come we may be listening to machines the size of a garden pea capable of holding 450,000,000 tracks (OK, maybe I'm dreaming there - anyway, who has that many songs?!) there will still be a need for a convenient storage method for music - which, at the moment, CDs seem to do just fine.
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