Music, radio and youtube

The premise of this little blogpage of mine is –partly- media-science. So let me get back to the basics and highlight something I noticed.

Back in the day music was brought by word-of-mouth. Meaning, a minstrel had to sing a song from town to town. Then, one day, a recording-device was discovered. Now the song could do without the artist and travel on its own.

Luckily those records, back then, couldn’t be reproduced that easily. So any copyright infringement only concerned people stealing other people’s music.
Of course this all changed when casette tapes were introduced. Now one could record a song from the radio.

Only to find out that halfway through the song the tape had run out.

It is also around this time that Disc-Jockeys decided to babble away through the song (including annoying sound effects).
You can still find some of these MP3’s online that were obvious radio copies.

Then computers and CD’s came to be. Now the whole copying became a whole lot easier. And with peer-to-peer sharing so did the distribution.

Now anybody with a pc could get a copy from a song without the tape-like (noise) quality. A, to the human ear at least, perfect copy of the original.

But then something strange happened. As the internet entered the brave new world of ‘web 2.0’  the original file-sharing-services in which one downloaded a song at a time made way for bulk-filesharing. With torrents one might share entire albums containing ten or twelve songs – even if the one downloading it only wants one.

Moreover, as ‘web 2.0’ happened upon us so did youtube.

Also Spotifi happened but we are talking about old obscure music and not-paying-for-anything here.

Spotifi is for the new generation.

You see, as peer-to-peer began a lot of people saw it as an opportunity to share their copies of once-of-a-lifetime performances and other rare gems in music. For the music lover those early days were a goldmine because people shared the beauty of music.

But, peer-to-peer was still considered illegal. So when youtube came to be the ‘treasure troves of’ music changed to the video platform. There it was legal for people to enjoy it. Moreover, the original uploader could be thanked for their effort in the comment section.

I still believe that is the original intention of the comment section. Although some might disagree.

Now we are at a crossroad. The original peer-2-peer networks have vanished in favour of bulk-sharing sites using programs like torrent.

And if that’s not enough it is now often the case that these ‘bulk-sites’ only offer the newest of the newest instead of the classics. So downloading the next attempt at eardrum-mutilation by Kayne West is easy. But finding the 1973 rendition of Ruby the Rolling Stones did at Weatbury is near impossible.

Moreover, obscure songs can hardly be found using the conventional googling technique of ‘title’ with the added term: ‘.mp3’.

So what did people come up with? Sites that let you convert the audio-track of a youtube video to mp3.

We’ve come full circle.

From taping a song from the radio we are now ‘taping’ songs from youtube.
History has a tendency to repeat itself.