Catherine Bradder wrote:
Sigh... all this is an education for me..
Why can't things be simple?
Because as Bill so eloquently put it; 'One Thing Leads To Another'
If Mankind hadn't been so inventive we'd all still be happily buying our music on vinyl sitting in our bedrooms looking at gatefold sleeves and immersing ourselves into every nuance such wonderful musicians helped provide. One format, popular beyond compare in its day, and practically impossible to duplicate for the average consumer, although no good for joggers for for playing in the car......
The invention of the compact cassette and hi-fi recording devices meant that people could borrow records and tape them leading to the development of the Sony Walkman. Enter joggers and XR3i drivers..... baseball cap sales soared!
Music fidelity and appreciation for it started to wane. Some people used cassettes as the means of sharing music (mainly bootlegged live recordings or studio outtakes) and packaged them off to like minded souls in trading circles. Record Fairs became a common source for getting hold of such tapes for a couple of quid to enable some people to build up a trading list with which to enter the arena of copyright infringement. Music fidelity, while still a consideration for tape traders (remember grading systems - A+, A-, B+ B-, C etc?)

, sank even lower as we thrilled to the sound of live perfomances recorded on cheap equipment kept out of view under seats. Some recordings gained legendary status and are sometimes seen as better than some official live albums.
The invention of the compact disc meant that the industry could deliberately phase out vinyl by lowering the quality of pressings allowing both an inflated price to be charged (£12 when launched) and entice plenty of people to
downgrade their collections by buying the same product all over again (and again and again as it would turn out). Bootlegs became on the whole better quality although quality control is not the manufacturers priority in such cases. Most of this material was not available commercially although in the modern world much of it now appears as bonus material in deluxe editions of albums some poeple have already purchased twice. In some cases (in the main fan produced DVDs) are better than the official counterparts.
What comes around goes around it seems..... Was home taping killing music or helping it survive?
Eventually cassettes - the most popular format at some point in the eighties - gave way to CD too. Newer cars featured in car CD players, joggers moved on to Sony Discman and then the iPod. CDRs and computer technology eventually allowed people to copy clones of their friends' albums for the price of a blank disc, much cheaper than tapes.
Meanwhile some clever boffins invented the world wide web and soon Napster was on hand to allow people to download free music, burn it to CD or to load it onto an iPod and file share across the globe denting a hole in the profits of Royal Mail and EMI et al. After years of being 'ripped off by the music industry', the consumer could get their revenge and beat the music biz who were not 'ready' to make full use of the new technology nor appreciate its marketability. Some irony there.....
Eventually, but rising exponentially, millions of people on an affordable global network are, in many cases without even realising it, breaking the law and making what had been a tactile and time consuming interest, a hands free immediately satiating addiction. Its the audio equivalent of taking drugs really.
While the above is not a PhD in the marketing and mass exploitation of music over the past 50 years, it shows that without all of these developments we would all still be spending money in the high street, although it has to be said that the old model could not acommodate the numbers of people who wish to make music their career. Which is another reason why the market has effectively dwindled. The times they are indeed a changing.
Apologies to joggers, but not XR3i drivers........
Despite the frivolous tone of the above, I am in no way condoning The Practice of Copyright Infringement.
Mick.