My Rant About Music

I started collecting music early in my childhood. I would buy 45 records each week based on new releases or up and coming hits on the top 100. I would come home and carefully lift the lid on my father’s HiFi set, put the adaptor ring in the record and dropped down the first song to play. You could also stack 5 or 6 records on top of each other and they would automatically drop down and play the next song. LP records were too expensive until my early teens I started to buy albums instead of 45s. LPs were great, one record had 5-6 songs on a side with liner notes to read and cover artwork to admire. After having to move several times I started to pack my collection in milk crates that doubled as shelving when set up. You could tell what your friends were listening to by the stack of empty album covers by the stereo. Smart people started to dub LPs onto the then new cassette tape and distributing it to friends and family. Wow free music on tape. But it didn’t match the sound on my Fisher HiFi set so I kept adding to my LPs and cassette tapes. Then something happened. Sony came out with Walkmans that played cassette tapes and had an FM stereo. How cool was that. Now I had more reason to collect tapes and play them anywhere I wanted. Mix tapes became a fade. My collection now weighed several hundred pounds, 6 or 7 milk creates and boxes of tapes. Apple came out with a Ipod that held digital music you had to buy from them and cost a lot of money. The pc then came into its own when CDs started coming out. You could even copy or rip a cd for your friends. Then this file sharing program came out called Napster. Your mp3 music could be shared with others and you could download their music also. All for free! Soon my collection was on hard drive storage. Getting a Ipod was the next step so you could carry your entire music collection on one device. LimeWire was next with even greater music selections for free. It was great while it lasted. I still have about 20,000 mp3 files from LimeWire. The next big thing for music was when I purchased a Microsoft Zune. It was like an Ipod but you could subscribe and have unlimited downloads. Long play lists were easy to set up and play. Then Cell phones turned into smart phones. My Iphone 4 had a camera and Itunes you could play music from your collection on it. Pandora, Itunes radio, Xbox Music will all stream music to my phone. I got rid of my mp3 players because my new phone can stream unlimited music from any artist any genre as much as I want. Record collection long sold at a tag sale for $1 a pop. Some times I just want to drop a record on my HiFi sit back and enjoy.