If You’re into Audio Gear, Follow Me Down This Rat Hole

I’ve always been a gadget nerd, especially when it comes to audio gear. Here are several examples of the kind of things that audiophiles love to watch and read.

In the Olden Dayes, the longest you could listen to a playlist uninterrupted was about one hour (one side of a C120 cassette, although that time could be doubled if you had an auto-reverse cassette deck). Compare that to the days of music that fit into a typical smartphone. Yet there were devices that could offer up long stretches of unbroken listening. This 1972 machine did basically what any iPhone can do today.

Japanese audiophiles are among the most intense in the world. Maybe too intense.

Then we have this article from The Independent that traces the history of recorded music.

How long has it been between the very first recorded song and the day that a song became the most streamed track on earth? A little over 150 years.

The most streamed track is, of course, Despacito, the Spanish-language track by Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee, featuring Justin Bieber. It has been listened to via streaming a whopping 4.3 billion times, 93 million of those in the UK… half as many times again as the population.

That first song recording took place on 9 April 1860, carried out by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville on a cylinder; a woman singing the old French folk song Au Clair de la Lune.

Aside from both being music – and, perhaps, non English language – it might be that they have little else in common. But just maybe they are bookends of our relatively slight, in terms of the history of the human race, ability to keep a permanent record of our music.

Before Au Clair de la Lune, music had to be heard live to appreciate it, in the concert halls or the drinking dens, whether chamber orchestras or drunken sea shanties. And afterDespacito… well, those 4.3 billion streams of that song are as ethereal and ephemeral as the oral tradition of music, played once and then lost in time, like tears in the rain, to quote a phrase.

As I listen to music on Spotify, or YouTube, or Apple Music, or any other streaming service, I am often struck by the rather bleak thought that all it would take would be for someone to switch off the internet – Isis, perhaps, or aliens, or Donald Trump’s finger inadvisedly hovering over some red button – and that would be it for a huge proportion of the population. No more music.

Read on.