Posted in: Recording by RCathey on November 4th, 2009 | 0 Comments
A paper on how the music recording industry has evolved and how musical stereotypes have evolved with it.
The next big technological advancement in music did not come until the 1980s when the compact disk first hit shelves(“Compact Disk”). The compact disk was essentially a miniature vinyl, but with very small laser engravings rather than needle engravings. The compact disk instantly stepped up the amount of music that could be stored on a disk and the quality of the music. In time, this allowed listeners to buy a CD of an artist they liked, and get up to 80 minutes of music. In the end, the compact disk allowed for a completely new level of stereotyping as well. When the compact disk was most popular, it was not too expensive to get music burnt onto a disk. This allowed for artists of all genres and all popularities to get their music out to the world. This also gave music listeners more variety to choose from as well, and the more variety there was the more stereotyping there was to go along with it. At this point in time, someone could go out and get a CD of almost any genre imaginable, with the choices growing day-by-day. This allowed people to judge others much more easily. The compact disk has stuck around, and is still the primary way to physically obtain music.
The latest in music technology is the use of digital music. Digital music is now available pretty much anywhere there is an internet connection. The first big digital music push was by Napster, an online file sharing service started in 1999(“Napster”). Napster allowed people to freely share digital music files, bypassing the established market for these songs and leading to huge copyright violation lawsuits. Eventually, Napster was shut down, but it opened the pathway for the peer-to-peer file sharing programs many of us know today. These programs allow people to share files they have with others searching in the same network. Programs like Limewire have exploded in popularity and are a main source of musical income for many people today. All of this digital availability of music has totally changed the face of music as it was known.
Today, most high school and college students download a huge majority of their music off the internet. The invention of digital music has also allowed people to keep their entire music collection in one place, on their computer. In his article “You Are What’s on Your Playlist” Benny Evangelista writes “While it used to take hours to browse through a person’s CD collection one album at a time, technology now makes that possible with a few clicks of a mouse”(Evangelista 282). The coming of digital music has probably lead to the biggest change in music related stereotypes yet. With almost any type of music with any sound you could possibly imagine available with the click of a mouse, there have been new stereotypes made and associated with every genre imaginable.
The stereotypes in music have heavily evolved and branched out since music’s origin, and music technology has played a big part in the evolution. In our world today, a person can experience almost any artist they want at any point in time using the internet and digital music. This change is responsible for many new genres of music coming into existence and becoming popular. People today have the luxury of being able to have very specific musical tastes, and still having the ability to find plenty of music to satisfy this specific taste. The availability of so many types of music has lead to new stereotypes for every one of these genres. Overall, technology has brought us so much more music and such a variety of music, but at the same time has brought many stereotypes along with it.
Works Cited
“Compact Disk.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 29 September 2009, 21:17. UTC. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. Web. 10 August 2004. .
Evangelista, Benny. “You Are What’s on Your Playlist”. Text Messaging: Reading and Writing about Popular Culture. Ed. John Alberti. Boston: Houghton Mifftin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2009. 280-284. Print.
Leeds, Jeff. “The New Tastemakers”. Text Messaging: Reading and Writing about Popular Culture. Ed. John Alberti. Boston: Houghton Mifftin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2009. 273-280. Print.
“Napster.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 29 September 2009, 09:13. UTC. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. Web. 10 August 2004. .
Schoenherr, Steven E. “Recording Technology History.” (2005). Web. 30 September 2009.
