In 1958, I was seven years old, and my sister took me to a Jerry Lee Lewis concert at Kellogg Auditorium in Battle Creek, MI. It wasn’t her idea—my father told her she had to. That concert is a story of its own, but instead, I’ll tell you about what we did the very next day.
We walked down Michigan Avenue to downtown Battle Creek and into something I had never seen before: a record shop. I absolutely could not believe what I was seeing. They had these little booths where you could take a record off the stand, go inside, and listen to it before deciding whether to buy it. How cool was that? At the time, 45 RPM records cost $0.67 each, and my sister bought Jerry Lee Lewis’s Great Balls of Fire. That was my first experience with what we now call physical media.
As the years went by and The Beatles became incredibly popular, I found myself buying not only 45s but also long-playing records—albums. Meet The Beatles was one of the first albums I ever bought. I think I paid $2.79 for it at a record shop in Hastings, MI. To afford it, I had to mow a couple of yards in our neighborhood. One of the things I absolutely loved about record albums was something called liner notes. Not only could you hold an album in your hands and admire the fantastic artwork on the cover, but the back of the album was filled with information about the artist and the people who helped make the record. Early on, I discovered that a gentleman named George Martin was The Beatles’ producer.
In those days, if you wanted to see a movie, you went to a theater. But eventually, something called videotapes—both Betamax and VHS—became available, allowing us to buy movies and watch them at home. Then came DVD’s. Record albums were eventually replaced by CDs. Then, to make things even more complicated, cars started coming with audio cassettes and 8-track tapes. All of this was physical media, and we bought it like crazy.
By the time I was in my 40s, I realized that I still owned every record album I had ever bought, starting from 1964.
Now, all of this physical media has been almost completely replaced by digital media. For $10 a month, we can stream all the music we’ve ever wanted to hear. While this sounds like an incredible technological miracle, it comes at a cost. We no longer own our music—we rent it. And to deliver that music through the internet and into our devices, it has to be compressed and manipulated. We are no longer listening to the artist’s original creation; we are listening to something that has been auto-tuned and processed.
I’d bet that you no longer have a VHS player or even a DVD player in your home. I can confess that I don’t. Now, we can watch any movie or television show we want with the push of a few buttons—of course, for a price. We no longer own anything—we rent it. While I certainly enjoy the convenience, I can’t help but wonder: what happens if someone decides what should be available to us? Since we no longer own it, someone else does. It seems that now most of our music comes to us through our phones to be listened to via ear buds or Bluetooth speakers.
Years ago, I took my giant record collection to a used record store on Gulf-to-Bay Boulevard in Clearwater and parted with it. I had been carrying it around for most of my life, and in what I now consider a bad decision, I said goodbye to it. However, I still have a whole bunch of CDs. I also own an SUV that not only has a CD player but also a cassette player built into it. Lately, I’ve been listening to my physical media quite a bit.
I read an article the other day that said Frank Sinatra’s Strangers in the Night has recently been manipulated and auto-tuned. What the hell is that? I feel very blessed to own an original CD of Frank Sinatra’s Greatest Hits, and I’m not parting with it. I can listen to his magical voice anytime I want—in its original form.