backstory: I bought my first couple of CDs when I was about 12 years old, and over 20 years later I still consider them to be very strong choices: Avril Lavigne’s debut album Let Go, and Disturbed’s second album, Believe. I still enjoy both artists and both albums, and I’m very pleased to note that they’re still active. The next two albums I consider deeply personal to me are Radiohead’s OK Computer, which my wife (then-girlfriend) spotted for me at a Cash Converters, and Paramore’s debut All We Know Is Falling, which kickstarted my lifelong love for the band.
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when led zeppelin… the beatles… wanted to record music, how did they think about it? this is the thing i want to have a more intimate understanding of. eventually we get to 1000 songs in your pocket, ipod, and then infinite songs, via streaming, playlists, internet, smartphones. the interim confusion of itunes etc was a kind of interregnum. i cant help but think/feel that we must be living in other interregnums… anna has tweeted some stuff recently, fog of change? it’ll all become clearer in retrospect, but the interesting work is to be done in the thick of things. i used to assemble so many notes about the early days of smartphones and instagram and so on, and a lot of it no longer seems particularly relevant. lang leav poetry, rupi kaur
random personal thoughts:
- was watching an old taylor swift / david letterman talkshow bit on youtube and it’s striking how people used to talk about CDs as THE default medium. makes me now curious to see/hear discussions about albums(?) from before CDs existed. this was in 2010, so iPhones did already exist, Spotify and YouTube also existed. It takes time for the old order to be replaced. Would be curious to read a good play-by-play of the transition. in 2016 Lady Gaga still cared to know if her CDs were selling in Walmart
- I was a hobbyist musician in 2007. We had a MySpace page, and we were hoping to sell CDs. We uploaded vids to YouTube, but quality low then (tweet)
- in 2008 I used to do music reviews for a friend’s review site, he’d send me CDs and I’d write reviews in exchange. The Most Somebody Can Know is still one of my favorite songs of all time
- I think Michael Jackson’s Thriller was the biggest CD…
- “In its height of popularity in the mid-1950s, approx. 750,000 jukeboxes were in use across the 🇺🇸. That dipped during the ‘70s & ‘80s, but w/ the advent of CD tech & a growing antiques market, the number of jukeboxes presently in use is a solid 250,000.”
- derek sivers had a company called CD baby… should email him about this post
random CD trivia:
- Sony met Phillips in Hanover, Germany, 1979 to argue about the size and shape of CDs. Eventually they settled on 11.5cm diameter & 74mins of storage. Why 74 minutes? To fit Beethoven’s 9th Symphony!
auxillary questions:
- soundcloud rappers? 50 cent? myspace? what were the bands that got big on myspace
tbc