I remember buying my first CD in 1989. This followed years of buying records and cassettes. (I am not old enough to have ever bought an 8-track, however.) Of course, the hang-up in buying CD’s sixteen years ago was the cost of CD players. At that time, I bought a boom box with a CD player for around $200, and that was a low end, off-brand piece. Later that year, I bought a portable CD player also for around $200.
Nowdays, you can get a boom box with a CD player for around $30, and a portable CD player for $10. That’s how the price of technology works.
Back when CD’s first became available, around 1985, it was realized that the vinyl record’s days were numbered. And years later, cassette’s themselves began to dwindle. It was predicted that CD’s were the end of the road for music media, technologically speaking. What would replace the CD, after all? Smaller discs?
Who could have known that the follow-up to CD’s would be something invisible? I’m talking about .mp3’s, of course. Now, I’m not buying CD’s anymore. I’m downloading songs off iTunes right to my computer, and then to my iPod. I don’t play CD’s that much anymore, either. I’ve got over 200 CD’s stored on the iPod, with plenty of room left over. The iPod can play through a tape deck, a radio, ear buds, or just a set of plain speakers. And you can toggle between songs and artists with just the turn of the thumb. How nifty is that?
So, I ask rhetorically, have we finally reached the end of music media? Will there someday be some form of media that will render the .mp3 obsolete. I don’t see how. You can’t get much smaller than the .mp3, after all, but who can know?
With that, are record stores also gradually becoming obsolete? After all, if you’ve got a computer, an Internet connection, and a credit card, you can get new music without ever leaving the house. And there’s no more deliberating over whether to buy a whole CD just to get a couple of good songs. You can go to iTunes and download those couple of songs without having to spend the money on the whole CD.
Years from now we’ll be telling those younger than us about records, cassettes, and even CD’s, and having to actually go to a store to purchase music. They’ll look at us like we’re old.