Records, 8-Track, and Cassettes

When a band releases new music, it is referred to as an album. An album used to be a phonographic record, but has now been updated to be defined as "A set of musical recordings stored together in jackets under one binding". As time marches on, people will forget that music used to be released only on vinyl albums. I barely remember it myself. I may not even be right, but this is my space so I can say whatever I want.

My parents had albums...a few of which I can recall included Roger Miller (King of the Road is the only song I can remember off of it), The Bee Gees (maybe it was the Saturday Night Fever Soundtrack), Kenny Rogers something or other, and likely Elvis. Myself...I had KISS Double Platinum in vinyl...and later on it was a DOUBLE CASSETTE. Somewhere in the middle, I had Aerosmith's original album on 8-Track.

I'm not telling you all this to age myself...I think it's fascinating to see how the release of music has changed in my lifetime alone and wonder how it will change again. Digital downloads through iTunes and other such services are the thing of today. I owned Twisted Sister "Stay Hungry" and Quiet Riot "Metal Health" on cassette...I now own them in CD quality digital download formats via iTunes. Oh...in all the confusion, I forgot about CDs. I swore I would never rebuy my cassettes on CDs...I lied. I guess it's the same as not rebuying all my VHS tapes on DVD. I lied about that too.

It's fascinating to me that not only can you find popular artists from yesterday all over the Internet today, but that so much more music is available from independent artists such as Hope Roth, who I happen to know personally and recommend that you buy her album from iTunes. See how I did that? I promise you that this was not paid advertisement...I bought a copy myself and it's quite good.

Maybe one day, if you're lucky, the new music format will be "beamed directly into your brain" out of thin air just by thinking about a particular artist. And after that...who knows!?