Music as a Live Experience
Music is something that has become ubiquitous with the human experience. Whether it’s the car stereo or headphones on your daily commute, or listening to metal while you rage clean the apartment, the advent of music streaming has allowed us to take a world's worth of music with us everywhere we go. While attending concerts and live music performances still has a special place in any music lovers heart, it can sometimes be hard to imagine that being the only way to experience music at all.
While it’s difficult to discern precisely when concerts came into existence, the earliest known instrument is a bone flute discovered in southern Germany and estimated to be between 42,000 and 43,000 years old. Instruments, with some variety in type, are featured in every early culture and often had significance beyond simply making sounds. Visual representations of music performance have been found in rock paintings and other excavated objects from prehistoric civilizations.
This means that for most of human history, music was not only an important part of our cultures but it was also something that had to be experienced simultaneously with it’s creation. Whether seeing an orchestra perform one of Bach’s symphonies or simply listening to friends and family ply their skills in whatever dwelling was common at the time, you had to go to where the music was happening. The technology that eventually allowed for a shift in where music could be found and heard didn’t come into play until 1877 when Thomas Edison invented the phonograph.
Music at Home
When Edison released his phonograph into the world it was a monumental first. While others had been able to record music before him, the phonograph was the first device that could both record and play sounds back. The technology was still far from perfected though. Edison's wax cylinders had to be recorded live and one at a time. The sound quality was terrible and you could only play it once before it was worn out and had to be replaced. Nevertheless the milestone would prompt a series of inventions and process improvements from people across the world.
Changes in materials would move from wax through shellac and even glass before finally landing on the plastic vinyl records that are still pressed to this day. The changes in material improved sound quality, mass production processes and solved durability issues. Although records and players wouldn’t find real commercial success until the late 1940’s When RCA Victor, Columbia would compete for their market share after record players were made to be affordable. Records would continue to dominate the new market of physical media, a personally-owned, physical copy of an album or song, until the next major innovations would unseat them, and their listeners, and enable consumers to take their music with them anywhere.
Also worth mentioning in this section is the advent of the radio. After Guglielmo Marconi sent his first radio signals across the Atlantic in 1901 the technology was primarily used to communicate with ships out to sea. The first music radio broadcast didn’t take place until somewhere between 1912 and 1917 and originated from a college in San Jose, though they wouldn’t broadcast daily for some time. In 1919, after World War 1, Medford, Massachusetts' 1XE has been credited with becoming the country’s first music radio station and many more would follow.
Early music radio programming had it’s struggles of course, with many people believing that there was no place for entertainment on the airwaves. Music radio persisted regardless and still enjoys a steady listenership to this day. It was in the late 1940’s, right around the rise of vinyl, that transistor technology improved enough to make radios smaller and get them out of the living room and into vehicles and portable units all over the country.
Music on the Go
Although radios had become mobile technology in 1947, bringing your own music collection with you wouldn’t become a reality for 20 more years. The innovation that would spark the next trend in music mobility would first appear in 1958 in the form of RCA’s first magnetic tape cartridges. Six years later, after a series of technological transformations and some healthy market competition, the 8-track cassette would emerge as the dominant medium for magnetic tape. This rise was assisted by the Ford motor company who had 8-track players as an available upgrade in most of their available models by the end of the 1960’s.
As technology continued to shift, the 8-track was quickly unseated by the compact cassette. Another magnetic tape product produced by Phillips took its place in the early 1970’s. The smaller package of the compact cassette allowed smaller players and greater mobility. The full potential of the medium, in terms of portability, was realized in 1979 with the release of the Sony Walkman. Battery-powered and small enough to clip onto your belt, the player allowed people to bring their music with them anywhere they might want it. Spurred by the popularity of the new compact players, compact cassettes would outsell vinyl for the first time in 1983 and mark a definitive shift in portability as a primary concern for music consumers.
The reign of the compact cassette was also doomed to be short. After the format of the compact disk was standardized in 1980 it was only a matter of time before the technology became inexpensive and powerful enough to become mainstream. By the late 1980’s musicians and consumers alike would switch almost entirely to the new format. Old catalogs were re-released on the new digital medium and CD’s would enjoy the remainder of the 20th century on top, peaking in 1999 with over $21 billion in sales.
Next up would be the rise of the MP3, a format that still dominates downloaded music content. The digital format was first introduced publicly in 1995 and the first pocket sized players would appear in the next two years. By 2001 more music was downloaded in MP3 format than was purchased in any physical format. File sharing programs like Napster and Limewire, although controversial in their own right, allowed listeners access to huge libraries of music as people shared digitized versions of their own music libraries with each other.
The latest advent in music listening technology is that of music streaming. First made available in 2004, the evolution of internet tech made it possible for users to listen to music without having to download the file first. The new technology quickly took over the music consumption market and has controlled it ever since. Services with seemingly bottomless music catalogues compete for their share of listeners and physical media sales are dismally low compared to the height of records and CDs. The industry as a whole generates less than half of its' compact disc peak with less than $10 billion being generated in 2018.
Technology in the Future
Just as it can now be difficult to envision a world without music as we know and experience it today, the idea of what might be next in the world of music seems impossible to grasp. What does life after streaming look like? For the time being tech companies seem content to focus on headphones and wireless speaker technologies. Was does seem clear is that live performance is likely to remain the ultimate experience for music lovers. Now more than ever, artists focus on bringing innovative performances to the stage so that fans will come to see them time and again. While technologies like VR headsets can put listeners front row or even center stage at their favorite shows and other technologies push artistry and sound to their very limits, the next shift in how we consume is likely right around the corner, even if we can’t yet see it. Streaming platforms have benefitted listeners immensely by putting a world of music at our fingertips, complete with helpful suggestions. It has even improved the odds for lesser known artists to get their music into the ears of would be fans, but with musicians being paid fractions of cents in royalty for each play of their song, fortune may no longer come with fame.
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