Everything About How We Access And Listen To Music Has Changed In The Past 25 Years
조회 수 5 추천 수 0 2020.07.15 04:21:12
id="article-body" class="row" section="article-body">The first-generation iPod wasn't the first digital music player, but it's the most important.
Apple
This story is part of CNET at 25, celebrating a quarter century of industry tech and our role in telling you its story.
I start just about every morning by shouting, "Hey Google, stream SiriusXMU," at the clipped to my kitchen wall. I could just as easily ask it to play any number of artists, albums, songs or playlists, stream an internet radio station from anywhere in the world, or let algorithms generate an instant "station" that fits my mood. As a music lover and collector, I finally have the endless jukebox of my dreams made possible by , an inexpensive and .
When , none of those things existed. Looking back today, it feels like they all appeared overnight. But it took a host of technological advances, and . Here's a brief look back at how it all happened.
From CDs to streaming
In 1995, CDs were the main music media format, surpassing vinyl sales at the end of the '80s and cassette tapes by 1993. At the time, though, if you wanted to make a custom mix or make a copy for your friends, you were still doing it to cassettes. Just two years later, that would start to change.
A Napster screenshot from 2001.
Wikimedia Commons
Oddly enough, the CD's digital format hastened its own downfall. By the late 1990s, the prices of computer CD-ROM drives had dropped and software for extracting audio from CDs and converting it into WAV and MP3 files -- aka CD-R drives that allowed you to create your own audio discs were pricey but attainable. By the end of the decade, you could easily set free the music once trapped on CDs and, perhaps more importantly, share it with others around the world via not-entirely legal .
Brett Pearce/CNET
Napster would eventually be sued out of existence by the recording industry in 2001, the following year. But the MP3 and the service changed the music world forever. Legal MP3 download sites like eMusic started popping up as well, and current music-streaming service.
Before streaming services really took hold, though, people continued to buy CDs and downloads, the latter getting a huge boost from Apple's iTunes store, which launched in 2003. Rather than risking industry lawsuits, Apple succeeded by inking deals with five major record companies to sell DRM-protected AAC audio files for 99 cents a track and $9.99 an entire album.
The DRM devil
DRM stands for digital rights management and anyone who's downloaded music before 2009 knows what a pain it can be. At its most basic level, DRM puts restrictions on how you can use a digital file that you own. In the heyday of Apple's iTunes Store, the company sold AAC audio files protected with its FairPlay DRM, which restricted playback to its iPod music players and iTunes. Along with limiting what you used to play them, the files couldn't easily be shared on P2P networks. In 2007, Apple started selling , and . The only rub there was Apple tacked on a charge of 30 cents per song if you wanted to have the FairPlay DRM removed from tracks you'd already bought.
Of course, Apple wasn't alone here, with likely the most notorious DRM overreach of the era. If you played certain CDs from the music label on your computer, it would the music. The software was also difficult to remove, and even the uninstaller created security issues for users.
By 2008, Apple would be the largest music seller in the US, but streaming was still wide open. Streaming services and stations continued to multiply during this time, starting with the likes of Pandora (now ) and Last.fm, which is owned by CNET's parent company ViacomCBS and no longer streams music. 2008 also was the year Spotify launched in Europe and grew quickly, thanks to a free-music model for anyone willing to put up with some ads between songs. The service wouldn't be , but in no time it became the leader, while competitors like .
And, just to put a bow on the CD's downfall in the past 25 years, for the first time since 1986.
Listen up
The evolution of music formats also changed how, where and when we listened to music. In 1995, you may have had a portable CD player and a fat wallet of discs that you carried with you. Or maybe you saved that for your car along with a cassette adapter that let you send audio from your CD player to your car's cassette deck. For listening at home, you'd have individual hi-fi components or a shelf system with a multidisc changer.
As music collections shifted from physical media to MP3s, you likely spent more time listening to music through your computer's speakers or connected headphones at home. The portable CD player was now in a drawer, replaced with . Although, you may have been indifferent to portable players until .
Within a few generations of the device, the iPod would become all the music system most people would need at home, in the car or bắc kinh on the go. At least until the first iPhone was introduced in 2007, which ultimately cannibalized its single-purpose predecessor. Just as the iPod wasn't the first digital music player, the iPhone wasn't the first smartphone, but it was the we knew only Apple could make.
MP3 players and haven't completely disappeared yet. Every once in a while . But for most of us, our phones are used just as much for music as they are for sending texts, getting directions, taking photos and bắc kinh scrolling through social media. A phone's wireless capabilities not only allowed us to directly download tracks over the air instead of a wired connection to a computer but also made it possible to trade in big, stationary speakers and for in all shapes and sizes.
And now here we are, able to ask AI digital assistants to play whatever music we want through a or . You can have it play in a specific room or send it throughout your entire house. Plus, with little to no effort, that music can follow you from your home to your car to the gym to the office or wherever else you go.
A creative boom
How we access and listen to music changed dramatically in the past 25 years, and so has music creation and production. Home recordings are nothing new, but the sheer amount of technological tools made available to musicians over the past couple of decades is staggering.
We have laptops that are as powerful as desktops, but weigh less than 5 pounds and can run digital audio workstations like Ableton Live and Image Line FL Studio, which started as Fruityloops back in 1997.
A singer can cut a vocal track to their iPhone, clean it up or add effects on a tablet or laptop, and then share it with bandmates living anywhere in the world so they can record their parts in the same way -- an entire song created without anyone stepping into an actual studio. Distribution has changed entirely, too, with artists able to go straight to consumers on sites like and
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