From Fisher-Price to Fishy Price
My Journey Through Music Formats
Subscribers to my Substack, my Instagram followers and anyone I have met in real life will know that I collect Vinyl records, and more recently I have gone back to collecting CD’s. There was no Long Play Thursday (LPT) livestream last Thursday because I was in Bristol with @Bakey-T and @Theartistlostboy having great food at Sandwich Sandwich, The Crafty Egg & Asado, great beers at Tapestry, Beercosm and Left Handed Giant, and visiting awesome record shops including Prime Cuts, Collectors Cave and Wanted Records. This meant that I couldn’t do a post on a LPT stream this week and had to think of something else to bang on about. I’ve been banging on about CD’s a lot recently, making notes and observations about music formats generally, and as we are on our way into the high fidelity streaming era, I thought I’d write something about that and my experience of music formats over the years.
I had cassettes as a young child, I can only remember a few; one was nursery rhymes, another was the audiobook of George’s Marvellous Medicine and the only other one I can remember is the audiobook of Ghostbusters II (but I only ever listened to side one, as side two scared the shit out of me.) Cassettes were pretty standard for my generation even at a young age, so much so that Fisher-Price, a pre-school toy company, manufactured a cassette player that was in pretty much every home that also contained children in the mid 1980’s. I believe it was relatively good value for money especially as it meant that the kids had something to listen to their audiobooks and terrible cassette singles (or “cassingles”) without getting their grubby hands all over the “Dad Stereo”. These Fisher price units weren’t personal stereos, they had speakers, and also a headphone port, the modern-day spiritual successor would be the Toniebox (if you don’t know, ask somebody with a child under ten). These cassette players were very kiddy, it wasn’t until the release of Home Alone 2, and the marketing genius that was the Talkboy that there was another cassette player aimed at kids, this time slightly older kids, and despite my hardest wishing, I never got one.
The Dad Stereo was something in many homes of the 80’s and 90’s, a stack hi-fi unit often in a huge ugly glass display case with a door on a magnetic catch mechanism that often found itself shattered after an incident involving wrestling (which everybody did try at home), a balloon football match or a horrendous accident involving Action Man. My Dad had a stereo system which comprised of two Wharfedale speakers, a NAD amplifier, radio tuner, and cassette deck, with a Dual turntable on the top. All housed in the standard glass cabinet with black shelves. I was allowed to touch it, but I had to be very careful when I did. As such, I don’t really remember messing with it all that much, as I had my own cassette player that I would routinely use to play the aforementioned Ghostbusters II audiobook to scare myself shitless before bed for some unknown reason.
I must have been about seven or eight when we got our first CD player in the home. I can’t remember the make or model, but it was a long black portable unit, and the CD tray wasn’t on the top like most CD players, it operated more like a traditional cassette deck and opened forwards. You put the CD in vertically, then closed the tray by pushing and clipping it shut. The sound quality wasn’t astounding as it was just a basic portable thing, no “Mega Bass” or some similar name that included multiple X’s that became the fashion come the late 90’s, but there was a noticeable improvement in sound quality between the fuzziness of the radio, the muddiness of the cassette and the clarity of the CD. With the exception of one album on Cassette, the first album I remember getting, all my music memories are in the CD era.
Consider that this is around thirty years ago, so I can’t say for sure if I am telling the truth, but I am telling my truth. To that end, I am reluctant to say what my first CD was, but I can tell you my first memory of buying a CD was in 1992. As I mentioned before I was seven or eight, so my brother must have been in his early twenties and had taken me to Woolworths on Bexhill high street (where I have multiple music related memories from subsequent purchases and from working there in my late teens). He let me choose the CD single of my choice. The all-important question I am avoiding here is what was the first CD I bought, and there is good reason to skirt around this. Anyone who pays attention to my output as a DJ, blog writer and general music fan will be aware of my stance on “guilty pleasures”, and that no pleasure should be guilty when it comes to music, a song you enjoy is valid enough through your enjoyment regardless of whether it is mainstream, commercial pop, or niche (with the exception of the Black Eyed Peas, if your favourite song is a Black Eyed Peas song… I don’t even know what to suggest to be honest.). All that being said, for anyone who didn’t hear it then, there is little I can say now that is likely to convince you that “Slam Jam” by the WWF Superstars is a great song. Having just listened to it for the first time in probably twenty years or more I can still vibe to this, there’s a melodic chorus, there’s a few rap verses, and the drums in particular reflect New Jack Swing, which is something I would later come to cherish when I got my first album, but that’s for another post because that was on Cassette. (Note: The reason this was after my first CD was because Cassettes were half the price of CD’s back then).
I can’t tell you the first album I owned on CD, the earliest memory I have of buying a CD album I covered on a Long Play Thursday stream a few months back (before the blog existed), but if you want a brief summary of that you can check out my Instagram post on Mark Morrison’s 1996 album “Return of the Mack” (Which also mentions the same branch of Woolworths as earlier). That album was essentially a gateway for me, and CD’s became my thing for the next fourteen years. I rarely bought singles as I didn’t see them as great value for money even back then. Why pay £3 for three songs when you could spend £10 and get eleven or twelve? Although, this was a flawed theory, which meant that at the height of my CD collection I definitely had a disproportionate number of absolutely terrible albums, undoubtedly aided by the record industry and its intentional move to encourage people to buy albums over singles throughout the 90’s and 00’s.
This was where labels would release songs to radio, but not as commercial singles, so people would hear a song on the radio but when they got to the record shops, they couldn’t buy it for £3 as a single, driving them to part with £10 each time for what was often, the one song they wanted and nine naff tracks that functioned as B-sides to the one track people actually wanted to own. What we essentially ended up with, were ten track singles, and I collected a lot of them over that time period, often trying to convince myself and anyone that would listen to me, that they were quality albums, on reflection, they weren’t, and following numerous CD collection culls over the last fifteen years or so I’m confident that most, if not all, of those have been discarded. Note the 1993 LP “Psyche” by PJ & Duncan does not constitute this kind of corporate cash grab, and is a full-length, high-quality, classic album in its own right.
A prime example of the ten track single explains why a song that everybody knows; MC Hammer’s “You Can’t Touch This” didn’t top the singles charts in the US (it was able to chart as a single via radio airplay and a limited 12” vinyl single release that was essentially for DJ’s), but Hammer’s 1990 album “Please Hammer, Don’t Hurt ‘Em” went all the way to number 1. As a result of this forcing the customers hand toward the LP, “Please Hammer Don’t Hert ‘Em” is one of the most successful Hiphop albums of all time, selling more than 2Pac and The Notorious BIG’s best-selling LP’s combined! If you’re interested in hearing more about this industry-wide sabotage of the single, I highly recommend the Billboard podcast Hit Parade: The Great War Against the Single.
As a teen, I spent most of my time shopping for CD’s and most of my money on CDs. Weekends consisted of going in and out of record stores like Our Price, MVC (where you got the “no brainer card” that was free that gave you about 10% off everything in store), and a local shop in Eastbourne called Powerplay which was great for hiphop with a lot of US imports. I’d go looking at the CD’s in newsagents like John Menzies and WH Smith, and whatever Woolworths was, I’d go there looking for CD’s in there too. I was also a member of the Brittania Music Club for a while, a mail order service where your initial offer of four albums for £1 each was compensated by the contractual obligation to buy a further six albums at an inflated cost that felt like roughly £1,000 pounds each. I mustn’t forget supermarkets either, I’d spend ages looking through the racks there too.
The thing is that CD’s were, and in the following sense continue to be, quite unique. They were used at home as your kind of premium audio experience, but we also used them in our cars and in portable players. Previous generations of audio technology such as vinyl records and cassette tapes lent themselves to essentially a stay at home format; Vinyl, and a portable on the go format; Tapes. People would buy albums on vinyl, and at the same time pick up a couple of blank cassettes and go home and record the album on to cassette. One for the home, and one for out and about, unwittingly what this meant was that the original vinyl was essentially preserved and often left untouched for long periods on a shelf, meanwhile the tape got taken to your mates house, copied, passed around the classroom, had half of it recorded over with something else, got dropped, snapped, or the reel got tangled to the extent you couldn’t set it right with an HB pencil, and then it would only cost a couple of quid to buy a new cassette and you could record the LP again. CD’s however, were both the home and away format, once everyone had Discmans (later rebranded to CD Walkman’s) we were no longer leaving our precious master copy at home on the shelf, we were slinging them in school bags, tucking them in the back pockets of our ridiculously baggy jeans (and inevitably forgetting about that and sitting on them), and spilling them all over the footwells of our cars. I should at this point give credit where it is due, as having fuelled the tape boom of the 90’s with the invention of the Walkman, Sony did try again to create the “tape” for the 90’s by way of the Minidisc, which in a very similar way to cassettes were mainly sold as blanks for people to record their CD’s to, the idea being that they were more portable than CD’s (true), better sounding than cassettes (true), and more robust than CD’s (whilst this was true, anyone who used Minidiscs will know, this just wasn’t true enough). They had a slightly inferior sound quality to CD’ s and were essentially the same design as a floppy disc, a plastic case, with a metal cover that the player would slide out of the way to access the data on what was essentially a mini CD inside. The metal covers were far too delicate and most of my Minidiscs ended up in the bin after I fished them out of my bag with the covers all bent or snapped off entirely. That being said there was something incredibly satisfying about inserting and removing a Minidisc from a player, it felt like it was straight out of Goldeneye, and on occasion I do consider getting one again just because of how cool they felt to use.
Consequently, until the iPod, CD’s for most people were their sole music format. Without that master copy sat at home essentially untouched meant that our CD’s were constantly getting lost, scratched, and damaged. Particularly with the rise in popularity of the in-car CD player, which saw discs were taken from their original jewel case homes and moved into CD wallets of a variety of sizes, slid in and out on demand, thrown on the passenger seat or dropped between car seats when the traffic light changed colour. There are numerous CD’s in my collection that I bought three or four times to replace lost or damaged copies. This all came to an end with the introduction of the iPod, where we now had what was essentially “the new tape” and we could rip CD’s to MP3 format and have the iPod on the go. Finally, the CD’s could be left at home on the shelf in peace… Perhaps this was the best music format situation we ever had or would have been if it weren’t for the fact that all our CD’s were scratched to shit from being in backpacks and falling out of gloveboxes for the last five years, making many CD rips unlistenable.
At this stage I remember a process of maybe a month or more of ripping every CD I owned, at the time I had a white MacBook which I used for creating music of my own. I had to be aware of Hard Drive capacity, so I made sure to painstakingly rip all the hundreds of CD’s I owned at 192kbps (the smallest file size). I don’t know if you’ve listened to an MP3 ripped at 192kbps recently but by todays standards it sounds like the digital equivalent of the tape I mentioned earlier that’s been dropped in a puddle, stood on, had all the reel pulled out, the reel has been chewed by a family of mice, then it has miraculously been put back together by putting an HB pencil in the spindle. It’s quite amazing at how far music quality has come in that respect, as I remember DJ’ing with a unit that my iPod classic plugged right in to and at the time it sounded fine, but now I listen to something of that low quality and I can’t deal with it. I understand nostalgia toward the audio quality of vintage equipment, people yearn for the crackle of an old vinyl, some even take comfort in the woozy warmth that comes with cassette tapes, but I don’t believe anyone strives for the crunchy digital thizz that comes with a low-quality MP3 file.
We’re spoilt nowadays with streaming, not only can we access millions upon millions of tracks, we don’t have to accommodate physical space for music if it’s not our “thing”, and the quality is high, although the wave of “high resolution” streaming services is unnerving me. For context, streaming service Tidal has provided a Hifi pricing level for high resolution audio for a number of years, other services offer this, and Spotify’s version is due to be available at some point this year. The issue with high resolution audio is that I know that I can’t tell the difference. This music fidelity recognition is often misconstrued as a kind of snobbery, and “audiophiles” have been known to belittle people who can’t hear a difference in frequencies from a super high-end system that might excel in a specific frequency range. Many would argue this is simply “the emperors’ clothes” for audio equipment, and that may be true in some cases, there is now however an actual test you can undertake to see if it is possible for you to detect Hi-Resolution audio over the existing standard used by streaming services. ABX High Fidelity Test - Spotify HQ edition (digitalfeed.net) I ran the test with a decent pair of headphones on, and despite wanting to convince myself that one track sounded deeper or fuller than the other, the results made it clear the combination of my ears and brain cannot differentiate. In which case you may think “Well what’s this whole post about then Koops? If you can’t tell the difference, why are you worried about it? You can just pay for the standard membership and be certain you aren’t missing out!” Yes, I know, but I’m more concerned about what this means for the future.
Of course we don’t know for sure what’s going to happen, but I’m wary that the streaming services are up to something. Spotify have already increased their prices recently, and I can’t help but think that we are collectively playing into their hands. At inception the goal was to create an affordable alternative to illegal P2P music sharing sites like Napster, Limewire and Kazaa, which in principle was a great idea. If the major streaming platforms just went away one day, most people wouldn’t know what to do for music (that being said Youtube strikes a unique balance between a music streaming service and its intended purpose as a video sharing site). But we are all invested in our streaming services now, we’ve saved and created countless playlists, we are beholden to them and their whims and any increase in subscription fee they see fit. Music technology has shifted and evolved over time, and although I can’t figure out how it will develop, I don’t believe it will just stay the same because someone at some point will want to introduce a way of making more cash from us.
As well as my affinity for Vinyl’s and CD’s, there’s a sense of paranoia that fuels my physical media collection… Are these streaming services waiting until we all totally rely on them then they’re going to charge us £50 a month to access the same service we already have now? Or are they going to tier music, so you have to pay a premium for specific genres, or charge more for access to certain artists? Are they going to remove the basic tier and force everyone to pay for high resolution audio once they are confident people are comfortable with inflated pricing?
It’s not like these services are actually all that reliable, tracks and albums already disappear and reappear on these services or are available on one platform exclusively temporarily or permanently to drive streaming traffic; this has happened a lot already, for example Snoop Dogg removed all Death Row albums for a time, and Ye has done this with his records too. I haven’t even scratched the surface of the issues streaming services create for independent and unsigned artists. If you’re unfamiliar with the way Spotify renumerates artists the model means that artists and labels you have never listened to take a proportion of your monthly subscription fee! This means that what the musicians you do engage with receive a minute crumb of a pie that major labels, their artists, major publishers, Spotify themselves, advertisers actually eat. That being said, it is convenient, it isn’t illegal (although I can anyone arguing that some of the practices should be), and everyone I know uses the service, so I can share songs knowing that the links will work. Personally, I will continue, and realistically even if the £50 price hike comes, I will have to consider it.
I probably have the best approach to music formats that I have ever had currently, my absolute favourite albums that I want for “listening sessions” where I focus my entire attention on them, and for the most part constitute “no skip” albums, I look to buy on Vinyl. For the favourite albums that are too high in price to warrant a vinyl purchase, LP’s that I wish to reminisce over that might not be top tier, anything that warrants repeat listening (as repeat listening on a CD is worlds better than on vinyl), albums I love that might have tracks (or often skits) that I would rather skip than listen to, and any album I look to find on Spotify that’s either missing (e.g. Raekwon’s 2009 LP Only Built 4 Cuban Linx Part II), or has a revised track list (Robbie Williams’ 1998 LP I’ve Been Expecting You), I buy them on CD. (Also, there’s something exciting about spending the equivalent cost of one record on a whole bunch of CD’s that all come in a kind of mystery bag from sellers on eBay, I’m really enjoying opening these up on Instagram live!) As for Streaming, I use this too, for finding new music, sharing music, researching genres, and playing genre or mood based playlists when I don’t need an album (e.g. Jazz for reading, Deep Sleep, Amapiano, New Jack Swing) and of course, for when I’m out and about, walking the dog or driving. The quality of streaming is far superior to the low quality MP3’s I had in the 2010’s and finally my CD’s get the respect and treatment they have always deserved, but never had the chance to get, so they stay at home safe on the shelf with my Vinyl. That being said, since I started writing this I have been looking at Minidisk players on Ebay!
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Join me live from 19:30 on Thursdays at https://twitch.tv/KOOPANUT to listen to records and chat about them.
Cheers,
Koops xx