Is it just me or is it truly irritating when you get out of cell service and you forgot to make your favorite Spotify playlist available offline? The funny thing about it is that it's totally a modern annoyance.
When you sit back and think about how much technology has changed in the last 20 years, it’s truly mind-boggling. Today, we think nothing about putting our AirPods in and firing up Apple Music, as we go for a run or plug our phone into the car and have Apple Music keep us company on the trip.
As we continue to celebrate NRT’s 20th anniversary, let’s take a trip down memory lane and reminisce about how we listened to music in 2001—and get depressed by how much money we’ve spent doing so.
The Physical Media
Although CDs were king in 2001, cassettes were still a part of our lives. Boomboxes were still sold with tape decks and it wouldn’t be until the late 2000s when cars would be sold without a cassette deck. The infamous cassette to headphone jack adapter for the car lasted a while longer due to portable CD and MP3 players. Cassettes are now a wave of nostalgia and a painful reminder of all the times we had to fish out and re-reel the tape when the player caught hold.
CDs had center stage in our lives in 2001. We arranged our living rooms and chose furniture to best store our CDs. Every so often, we would spend an evening re-organizing our CDs. We would go shopping for the coolest binder to hold our collection or the coolest car visor holder. Before we could leave on a road trip, we had to make some tough decisions about what CDs had to stay behind.
We couldn’t talk about physical medium without talking about vinyl. Vinyl is the physical medium that’s stood the test of time. There’s something to be said about the warmth of analog that a vinyl record brings. It’s either that or because vinyl isn’t biodegradable (not to mention it stores easily in the attic).
The Start of the Digital Age
In 2001, computers started becoming more commonplace in the home. This meant we could rip CDs into digital files and create playlists, thus allowing us to listen to music—without changing out discs or tapes. With burnable CDs becoming less and less expensive, mixtapes gave way to mix CDs. Was I the only one that bought burnable CDs by how cool they looked?
Piracy was a huge deal at the beginning of the digital age. It started innocently enough. A CD or a thumb drive was shared for a friend to listen to a new song. It was easier than loaning your sketchy friend a CD (This meant you wouldn't have to worry about losing your disc).
Then, the Internet entered the landscape. Now, we didn’t even have to go to anyone's house to share digital files. Filesharing sites Napster and LimeWire became household names. We might have gotten a letter from our Internet provider every once and a while, but we had all the music we wanted.
For those of us with a dial-up Internet connection, we would set the download to start before bed and, hopefully, wake up to a completed download. Not that we did this, but we could throttle upload speeds, so we could download everything we wanted but didn’t have to tax our upload speed. That was the technicality, right? We had heard that it’s not illegal to download, it was only illegal to share.
The race for the portable digital media player was just heating up in 2001. MP3 players still had some major limitations, namely the availability of content and storage space. There were plenty of devices on the market, but none of them asserted dominance.
Sony tried to translate the success of their Walkman series into digital players but ran into issues when they tried to use proprietary formats. Apple cracked the code in late 2001 with the first iPod. Although it was proprietary to the Mac computer, it was still wildly popular. It had a 5GB hard drive and boasted that it could fit 1,000 songs in your pocket. Apple would update the iPod a few months later, adding support for Windows.
CD Players were starting to include MP3 capability, as well. Users could install an aftermarket player in their car or take an MP3 CD on the go with a portable player. By this point, the personal CD players had enough anti-skip technology that listeners could breathe around the CD player without it skipping.
In 2001, the rich media environments that MySpace and later Facebook, Instagram, among others, would become were just a few short years away. However, there was GeoCities, personal web pages that you could create with a Yahoo! account. You could create your own webpage, style it how you wanted, and upload content to share.
For a quick moment, adding MIDI, technology to play musical instruments, to your page was all the rage. I add GeoCities because I would argue that it impacted how we discovered new music. As one of the first social media sites, bands were able to create easily discoverable fan pages and music lovers could talk about the music they were listening to.
The subscription-based streaming service Pandora was new to the market in 2001. While Internet radio had been around for a little while, it was a novel idea that you could curate your own radio station. The song play was still random, but you could tell Pandora what you liked and it learned more about you. You only had so many skips per hour before you had to listen to whatever Pandora had for you, so you had to use your skips wisely.
I want to pause for just a moment and mention that many of us still had dial-up Internet at this point in time. Broadband at home was starting to become more available, but usually only had speeds between 128 kilobytes per second (kbps) and 512 kbps. The standard size of a song today would have taken about 12 minutes to download on dial-up and two minutes on broadband.
Does anyone remember HitClips? They were small digital audio players that had one minutes’ worth of hit songs at the time. I remember getting these in McDonald’s Happy Meals. Nothing says happy like repeating the minute clip of Britney Spears's "Oops, I Did It Again." Stacie Orrico was one of the few, if not the only, Christian pop artists that a cartridge was made for.
What about ringtones? Hours were spent browsing 5-second clips on our flip phones searching for that perfect ring tone that we would purchase for $1.99.
The Discovery of New Music
I’ll wrap up with how we found new artists and music. Honestly, some of how we found new music hasn’t changed in the last 20 years. Sites like NewReleaseToday, then NewReleaseTuesday, were starting to pop up and magazines, such as CCM Magazine, introduced us to new artists. Christian Radio was booming and the larger populated areas had quite a few stations to choose from.
Sampler CDs were very popular in 2001. They were either cheap or free and usually had a mix of eight to 10 songs from different artists. If I remember correctly, a lot of the sampler CDs were from magazines or Christian bookstores. Speaking of Christian bookstores, does anyone else remember the sampler box with all the buttons? You pushed the button and it would play a 30-second clip from the song. The only disappointing thing about them was that they played the full clip before you could push the next button. You couldn’t keep pushing the buttons every five seconds.
Last but not least is live shows. While we still find some new artists at live shows these days, we’re able to research and listen to the artist before we step foot in the venue. While I lived in a place with very few shows at the time, I hear quite a bit that people went to shows just to go to a show; it didn’t matter who was playing. If a new artist was on tour with someone you wanted to see, you either had to commit and pay for the CD or wait until the show to hear what they sounded like. For me, at around ten dollars per CD I know I was very picky about actually buying a CD.
From analog to digital, physical to streaming, in person or watching live streams, with friends or along on a job in the middle of nowhere, we are discovering more music, more often. While the methods will continue to change and evolve, music discovery will always be the end result, and for that, I'm very grateful.
Jake is a longtime fan of Christian music, Jesus Freak Cruiser, a techie, and a softball player. He lives in Texas with his wife and daughter and hosts the NRT Now Podcast in his free time.
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