As a kid growing up in the 1960s, portable music meant a transistor radio, tuned into one of the pirate radio stations broadcasting from unseaworthy vessels and abandoned structures in international waters off the UK coast. Hence my lifelong love of psychedelic music, as the pirate DJs had playlists beyond the commercial top 40 that was featured on the “Fab” Radio Luxembourg.
Later, the fledging BBC Radio 1 (and later still, the first UK commercial radio stations of the early 1970s) added to the wider choice of popular music, and the introduction of genre-specific programmes, sometimes with a regional focus or predominantly playing album tracks rather than singles.
Aside from the hippies on board Radio Caroline, my night-time listening in the 1970s comprised John Peel’s BBC Radio 1 programme, which kindled my interest in punk and beyond. (Peel once played a track by Greenfield Leisure on which I played guitar.)
Alongside transistor radios, portable cassette decks made it possible to compile your own mixtapes (and copy your mate’s records), but it wasn’t until the Sony Stowaway (later the Walkman) that cassettes became truly portable. Such was the interest in this new playback format that the British Electronic Foundation recorded a cassette-only album in its honour (“Music for Stowaways”), and Bow Wow Wow released a cassette-only album called “Your Cassette Pet”. Having gone through several different portable cassette players, I ended up with the Sony WM-GX674 released in 1999, to mark the Walkman’s 20th anniversary.
The Sony Walkman unwittingly made it much easier for fans (and bootleggers) to record live concerts, and I still have a bunch of cassettes from London’s Camden Market of live shows I attended only days before. The growth in cassettes led the music industry to launch its ill-conceived “Home Taping is Killing Music” anti-piracy campaign – little did they know what lay ahead….
The next shift in music portability was the Compact Disc equivalent of the Walkman, the imaginatively named Sony Discman. While not 100% skip-proof, the Discman and its competitors did allow commuters, pedestrians and even joggers to enjoy music on the move (using personal earphones in public spaces, of course…).
A number of other recording formats appeared during the early 1990s, such as the Digital Compact Cassette, Digital Audio Tape and the MiniDisc, but despite their superior audio quality and portability, they failed to catch on with the general public, and have mostly disappeared.
Unlike CDs, which are enjoying something of a revival – especially as consumers like the permanence of owning a physical artefact, as opposed to paying rent to a streaming platform. Plus, streaming platforms can remove content at will, making it unavailable to customers. I recently bought a new CD player, the CP2 from KM5. Although not as compact as my old Discman, it is still highly portable, and includes a loud speaker (unlike the Discman), and can both receive and send audio via bluetooth; and unlike the old Discman, it doesn’t require batteries, being chargeable via USB-C.
The internet age brought with it a new audio format, the mp3 file. If the music industry was worried about cassette piracy, it was nothing compared to file-sharing enabled by tech such as BitTorrent, and peer-to-peer platforms that deployed it. But when the first portable mp3 players emerged in the late 1990s, their storage capacity was limited to barely an album’s worth of songs. Also, the mp3 and digital music in general brought with them a new format war, as tech companies and music labels tried to control how consumers access, store and playback their music. This threatened issues of incompatibility, with digital content being locked to specific devices, or to specific record labels, using their own digital rights management protocols.
Thankfully, the first iPod from Apple played most digital file formats, alongside Apple’s own proprietary m4a format, tied to their devices and Apple’s iTunes download store. And thanks to their increased storage capacity, shuffle function and connectivity to iTunes, iPods became hugely popular, especially when a lot of new music was not always released in physical formats. I have had several generations of iPods over the years, and I still own models from 2005 and 2008, which often accompany me on overseas trips. I also have an iPod Touch from 2012, just for good measure.
Now, with my iPhone, I don’t use it to store music, apart from a small amount of content linked to my iTunes account. I don’t subscribe to Apple Music or Spotify, either. Instead, I use my Bandcamp library, and occasionally Soundcloud, as well as streaming some podcasts and radio stations (subject to geo-blocking, of course…). I choose not to use music streaming services because: 1) I prefer to buy my music as direct from the artists as possible, or in formats where artists are earning a better share of royalties compared to streaming; 2) some streaming content is geo-blocked so I can’t access it in Australia 3) I like to be in control of what I am listening to, rather than being a passive consumer of whatever streaming platforms (and marketing budgets) think I should be listening to 4) I don’t trust the streaming algorithms.
One of the reasons I bought an iPhone was to use iOS apps to make my own music, thanks to the plethora of synthesisers and other production tools that were launched off the back of this new and portable operating system. But that’s another story…
Next week #11: Productivity Tools
