Moving on up
- the digitalisation of music (...)
All we hear today is how we’re in a digital age, and how a focus on digital is what is moving our lives forward for the better. When it comes to music, many things have happened in the industry and there’s a debate regarding whether this is moving the industry forward or making it lose touch to where it came from.
The romantics among you will be harking back to the days of vinyl, when life was a lot simpler and you knew what you liked and didn’t like. There was no electronic background, and artists had to be far more practical in their creativity to reach the summit.
Since everything went online, and the world began to be powered by the electronic world – we’ve gone from cassettes to CDs to having collections stored in computers to being put on mp3 players to being put on your phone as a custom ring tone.
Without sounding too much like someone born in the wrong era, whatever happened to our industry? This transition means that music takes on a digital existence in the main. This convergence threatens music that is in its original condition.
The legends that we look at in the 50s and 60s – from Elvis to The Beatles – started the traditional music industry, before disco and rock began to take the world by storm. This was all before there was a sniff of the digitalisation of music. From here we saw world stars emerge and stadium concert tours were now on the menu. With music in a real golden age, bands like Oasis and Nirvana entered. From here, digital took over, consumerism began to rule the world and the transition from analogue to digital seemed to happen effortlessly.
It’s gone from what was an art form, to what is now entertainment. A song doesn’t turn into a worldwide sensation without a good music video, and bands don’t get printed unless they have a dark or wild side.
From where I’m standing it’s starting to lose touch with where it came from. Whatever happened to the finger snappers? And have did we manage to manoeuvre our way through these ages without taking at least something with us. Hot pants are still around, but how did flares ever die out? That said, things change – people don’t always like it but they do. In the 1980s, Nottingham Forest were huge in the world of football – that changed. Before 1991, the World Wide Web didn’t even exist in its simplest form – boy, has that changed.
This move away from tradition didn’t happen overnight, but it was seamless in the way it worked. But, what happens with your old vinyl and CD collections. Is it time to make room on your shelf by selling CDs or should you keep them for sentimental value?
Ultimately, that is something only you can answer but the truth is that you will have all your songs on your iPod, phone and/or computer so it is surely something worth considering. Using a service like Musicmagpie can help you to make some pennies back on your vast collection which you can invest into your digital collection.
itm? contributor
