Article written by Lauren Johnston.
This week we are going to travel back a bit and go through the history of music and how available it has become for our sweet little ears to hear basically on demand. Today if you want to listen to music it’s literally at the touch of a button. We have so many online platforms we are now able to reach out to listen to our favorite song or download albums upon albums, you can even make and record your own music via different apps, there’s not much preventing us from not listening to music now compared to the past.
When people over a certain age talk about music in the past I can guarantee you that most people’s mind will jump straight to bands like ACDC, The Beatles, The Hoodoo Gurus, and many other bands from that era, but rarely do you hear about how they used to listen to said bands. I know for a fact my grandad was the absolute worst for telling me every time I used my phone to play music that “back in my day we didn’t have any fancy gadgets, we listened to music on the radio or if you were lucky a big boom box you had to carry with you everywhere.” It wasn’t until recently that I realized that it was true, that he wasn’t just being an oldy, there was in fact very limited ways of listening to music and realistically unless you had money, music wasn’t a very big part of your life.
Music was only accessible on radios and boom boxes, cassette players and hearing theme songs or any type of song on a TV show. Music wasn’t big until the 1940’s and even then that was because Jazz had broken off into many different Varied fields such as bepop, and normal contemporary Jazz. It wasn’t until the late 1950s that Rock ‘n Roll was going to become the most popular component of music with the Rockabilly boom.
The thing about music is that it has been around as long as humans. Research says that music has been around for at least 55,000 years in many different styles, forms, and culture. Music is found in every culture now and in the past, and will continue possibly until the end of time. Just like the possible first music to be invented in Africa and then has evolved to become a fundamental part in our lives, (I may be wrong but this is what research says). Music is a constant changing and ever evolving media which is capable of many things that we as a population couldn’t possibly imagine. There are now apps that allow us to use our creativity and take music to new heights.
This is another technological aspect of music that my Grandad never understood. Apps that allow you to create music, apps that allow you to stream and download any song that your heart desires, and yes to my grandad’s surprise, even the ‘good ol’ day hits’. There are many apps that are available to us today that we can download to our phones such as Soundcloud, Spotify, Pandora, Youtube and many more, these are just some of the apps available. These apps let us create original songs, or songs we choose to cover, or simply just listen to any song that is available on the app of your choice.
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Apps have helped music in a lot of different ways over the past, from simple music radio stations to download to your phone, to apps you can download and stream music videos or songs, but also customize your own playlist of all your favourite songs without having to look up each individual song, which was probably the most annoying thing my grandad did, he would put a cd or something on and then skip every song to find this one song he was always looking for EXCEPT IT WAS ON ANOTHER CD! It’s because of these apps that we are able to save time in our daily life and are able to have our favourite bangers at the touch of our very own finger tips, it’s also because of apps like these that I no longer have to listen to 10 seconds of a million songs just to find one single song.
Basically, through the past couple of decades music took a trip down the rabbit hole of what we call technology, and has now grown to a multimillion dollar industry that it is today. Spotify alone has 20 million songs on it and that’s according to a recent study done by Spotify, not only that, but 4 million of those songs have never been played once. That’s only just one app out of the abundance of apps that are out there today. Don’t get me wrong, nothing will feel the same as the weight of a boom box on your shoulder, or pulling out that cd player you could take on the go that was operated by batteries, don’t lie we all had one, but personally I would never swap my Spotify Premium for the world, that shiz took a crap ton of time and effort.
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