Over the past two decades, the music industry has undergone a drastic revolution. It's crazy to think about how far it has come in such a short period of time.
My first music format was the cassette. My mom either lost or sold all of her records, so I never experienced that form of technology. But I distinctly remember going to the music store and buying the Lion King soundtrack on tape.
My brother and I would listen to the radio with blank tapes in the deck and if a song came on that we liked, we would record it. To this day, I sometimes pull a mixtape out of the box on my shelf at home just to see what I was listening to back then.
The cassette was short-lived, however. Before I knew it, everyone seemed to have portable CD players. In middle school, my friends and I would make mix CDs for each other. And I used to love thumbing through the album booklets of my new CDs.
Thinking back on it today, the portable CD player served as an appropriate precursor to the mp3 player. With a tape it was a hassle to skip a track, but with a CD player it became second nature to skip songs. In this way, the listener gained much more control with CDs.
User control reached its apex, however, with the mp3 player. Mp3 sharing made it easy to browse music online and choose individual tracks to download.
I must have been in fifth grade when my brother and I downloaded Napster and discovered that getting music was as easy as clicking a mouse. Little did we know that what we were doing would cause freak-out in the music industry.
And that's where we are today. Essentially, we have witnessed the music industry become digitized. Most people are more likely to hear about new music on a blog than on the radio.
CDs are still slowly being phased out as pirating and legal online downloading become the most common ways to acquire music. And record labels have reacted in different ways.
One innovative company has come up with a unique way to sell music. Invisible DJ created the "Music Tee," a tee shirt that comes with a digital download code for an album. The shirts feature either the cover art for the album or another artist-related graphic.
The shirts seem to be playing to those who prefer to receive something real and tangible when they buy music. I think the shirts are a good idea because they retain the need for visual art to accompany albums.
Mos Def and Devendra Banhart have both made their latest albums available as Music Tees. Interestingly enough, some record labels are reverting back to old forms of music distribution. Eggy Records of Portland, Oregon, for example sells all of their music on cassette format.
They sell their tapes in local café s and businesses, a move to that can be read either as an anti-digital statement or simply as the strategy of a company that values the aesthetic value of tape hiss.
The music industry is in a state of uncertainty for the future. Twenty years from now, whether we are all wearing music tees or listening to tapes once again, one thing is for sure: we will be listening to music somehow.