Today I want to write about how music especially consumption medium has changed over the years. I thought of this while listening to a song called “Dil Tu Jaan Tu” since I don’t think I would have been able to get a physical copy of this song back in the older days easily as compared to now when it’s just a search away.
Growing up, I remember our main source of songs used to be something called a Cassette. Radio was also involved because you can’t own all the cassettes, right?
Among my favorites was/are old Hindi songs by the likes of Kishore Kumar, Lata Mangeshkar, and Mohammad Rafi. That music is timeless. Such great lyrics as well. On the radio there used to be a show during the night that played such songs, not sure but maybe called “Purani Jeans”. Recently I have watched a few okayish old Hindi movies but the music is still great.
Then there was Bollywood music, the late 90s and early 2000s some great movies and music. Some of those movies were “Kuch Kuch Hota Hai”, “Dil To Pagal Hai”, “Dil Chahta Hai”, “Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham”, “Mohabbatein”, Kal Ho Naa Ho”.
A device called Walkman was the first ever portable music player I remember. It was a cassette player.
After that came the era of CDs and CD players. We owned a 3-in-1 music system which had a cassette player, CD player, and radio.
By this time, things started moving fairly quickly, mainly due to the entry of the Internet. Once the Internet came home, things completely changed because you could download songs and listen to them. During this time, you burned CDs and used to listen to them on any portable player.
Got exposed to English songs via the internet plus TVs started having music channels. Plus for the first time saw music videos on TV. I think among the first ones was this great song and video by Bon Jovi called “It’s My Life”.
Then came the era of iPods. This coupled with the rise of USBs as a storage medium, basically signaled the end of CDs.
Now we have streaming services like Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, etc. You can listen to any song you want, anytime you want. I’m so grateful for the invention of the internet, making so many things accessible to us.
I would recommend watching the Netflix series called “The Playlist” which is about Spotify and how it came into existence. It’s a good watch.