Then: CDs and Cassettes

Now: Music on Demand

Definitely not a tapedeck.

Since 2000, we’ve gone from FM radio, tapes and CDs to Napster, MP3 players, streaming and even back to vinyl. How did that fairly rapid progression change our relationship with music, if at all?

Theo Cateforis (TC): Our relationship with music has changed radically over the past quarter-century. The biggest change, perhaps, is that we own much less physical copies of music than we used to, and now access most of our listening through streaming databases.

And for those who still have a craving for a personal connection with a musical object, the vinyl LP has re-emerged as the ideal format due to its size, jacket designs, posters, inserts, etc., which have given it an aura of “authenticity” for many consumers. Ironically, plenty of people buy the vinyl just for the materials and listen to the music primarily through streaming sites.

Being able to instantly stream music as individual tracks or selections means that most listeners no longer engage with albums as whole entities. Rather, most of us pluck tracks from albums to create our own personal playlists. We relish the flexibility that streaming has granted us.

Given that the new mode of music consumption really is not based as much in listening to entire albums, an interesting question to consider is when and if artists might eventually abandon the album format altogether and simply return to releasing individual selections only (as musicians did prior to the invention of the Long-Playing format in the mid-twentieth century). I doubt this will happen anytime soon, but maybe somewhere down the road?

YouTube was founded 20 years ago this February. How has it altered the music industry and the music consumer?

(TC): YouTube has altered the music industry in profound ways. From Justin Bieber to Lil Nas X, it has allowed novice musicians uploading their music onto social media to become stars with major hits. It has also helped music become much more global in nature, making an international phenomenon out of Psy, with his 2012 “Gangnam Style” hit—an artist and song that likely would have had little if any traction outside of South Korea and the K-Pop market were it not for the video’s massive popularity on YouTube. The most watched video on YouTube (“Baby Shark”) is another Korean phenomenon.

For academics like myself who study music history, YouTube has been a revelation: an archive onto which individual users and companies alike have uploaded historic videos, performances, out-of-print videos, obscurities, rarities and more that have completely transformed the way we research media and implement it in our teaching.

When I first started at SU nearly twenty years ago, I used cassettes, CDs, VHS tapes, and DVDs in the classroom, all of which had to be cued up on different players to construct the classroom experience. It was a laborious and at times nerve-wracking process. Now, all that media—much of it available on YouTube—can simply be embedded in a single PowerPoint presentation. It is a completely different world altogether.

YouTube also promised a more democratized media environment where user-generated content would rub shoulders with professional-grade materials. Part of the pleasure of YouTube for many is the ability to upload DIY performances, school concerts, home videos, playing guitar in the bedroom, silly dance routines, record reviews, response videos and much more. It is a big, messy, sprawling mass of content that simply invited jumping down its “rabbit hole” in search of seemingly endless delights.