On Saturday, I had a day where I was more cognizant than usual about the unfortunate prospect of approaching my mid-twenties.
Then I unlocked some memories.
For much of my life, time spent in the car was where I got my music. On the way to school, sports practices, and road trips. How many great songs did I hear for the first time on the radio while I sat in the back of the car?
Too many to count.
The internet wasn’t as accessible in those days. Even as the first smartphones became more common towards the end of the 2000s, kids didn’t get them nearly as young as today. I didn’t have Spotify evaluating my preferences and introducing me to new content. Music, in general, wasn’t as easy to get a hold of. I had to get to the bus stop on time to catch Much Music Countdown at 3:30, or I had to be going somewhere.
Before it was Virgin, 94.5 was the Beat! It was my favourite station in Vancouver.
Most times, it was the latter.It came down to my listening skills and a little luck. The best-case scenario was when the radio jockey would either announce the song before it played or tell you what it was after the fact. I considered myself very lucky when they did this because it meant some extra work on my part when they didn’t. I would have to try and recall some of the lyrics to search them on the iTunes store and find the song again. If I couldn’t remember anything, that meant I was shit out of luck until the next time I heard it on the radio.
Building my musical library was somewhat arduous, not to mention expensive. I remember iTunes charging $1.29 for a single song at one point. When your allowance was $5, that works out to barely four new songs a week! I had to choose carefully. The thought process was something along the lines of
“Which song will it suck the least to not hear again for a week until I get paid?”
If I really liked five songs, I had to give one of them up.
The only free songs I could get were at Starbucks, when they would give out those little coupons you could redeem on the iTunes store. Does anyone else remember that?
Remember these?
They usually sucked, but I took them anyway because you never know!
Do you remember the “old days” of listenership?
When I’m an old man, maybe I’ll remind people that I had to work hard to listen to music in my day!
Griffin
Cannot speak about the old days…but in ancient times (before the internetwebs)…you either went to the international magazine store (on Broadway in Vancouver, or on 8th Avenue in my home town Calgary), and picked up a copy of NME, ID, The Face, or Time Out (London) and scoured the articles and concert listings to see what was listed or mentioned. You then went to the import record store (Zulu in Vancouver, The Record Store in Calgary) and scrounged through the new release section. Every now and then, something crazy would show up like a live bootleg concert recording. Copies from from the aux line out of the soundboard were invariably better than the “tape deck under the coat” recordings.
Fascinating!
I was being a tad tongue-in-cheek referring to 2005 as the old days but it blows me away how much music as a whole, let alone the way we access it, has changed in just 15ish years.