Spotify, Sound Cloud, YouTube – all great places to find new music to listen to. Not only that, they’ll even direct you to similar artists, and down the rabbit hole you go. Before those sources, how did you go about finding more music? I feel like it’s been so long since people frequented music stores. Wait, music stores? Streetside Records, Sam Goody, F.Y.E., Record Town, Camelot Music – boy those names bring back memories. To top it off, you actually had to spend money and hope what you bought was good, because you couldn’t always sample the music. Every CD was sealed in plastic, in addition to that really annoying adhesive-backed seal on the opening that said, “peel here”. Yeah, you remember that, now? It always left residue that I just couldn’t leave alone.
But before that, there were cassettes. I mean, CDs were great, because of how quickly you could skip from one track to the next…and the sound! Speaking of skipping, do you remember the portable CD players, or Discman? You couldn’t really walk or jog unless you paid a few bucks more for the anti-skip function. All right, so it’s hard to stay on track, here. Tapes, what to say of tapes. Well, I guess you had to turn them over periodically. As far as the sound goes – I didn’t complain; I didn’t have anything to compare to! I did have this stereo that was “smart”, and stopped rewinding or fast forwarding when silence was detected.
I guess I still got sidetracked from what I was originally going to talk about. Let’s jump back to where the internet was becoming more mainstream, and Napster made its debut. Especially on a T1 internet connection, it was insane to just fill your hard drive with music. Some other platforms include iMesh, Audio Galaxy. My favorite was Audio Galaxy, because of its unique collection of electronic music. It also didn’t slow down your computer as much as the others did.
I hope you enjoyed another stroll down memory lane.