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Guaranteed* Audio Episode 22 | See These? CDs! (Patreon)

Published:
2022-09-22 13:12:53
Edited:
2023-06-26 04:01:15
Imported:
2026-10
Tags:

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Content

Special guest MING DOYLE joins Neil & Kevin (sorry Ryan-heads, no Ryan today) in a discussion of our early-2000s music consumption habits. Fun fact: This episode would not fit on a standard audio CD!

00:00 Introductions and catching up07:30 ⚡ Media Current ⚡20:30 How We Accessed Music When We Were Younger???1:16:20 Questions From Patrons

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Comments

Damonscomputer

Yippeee! Hope Ryan is back next time

dharrius_archive

So happy to see a new episode! And as a 15-year-old who spends the majority of my week listening to music, I can say that I find myself listening to full albums from first to last more often than shuffling on Spotify :]

MC Melody Doll

Great ep! Ming should be on more often!

Mark Hughes

Great episode! As someone who is approximately around the same age as all of you (though closest to Neil) and who listened to a lot of music growing up through various formats, I found this episode very relatable, and would like to share my somewhat self-indulgent thoughts. I started listening to popular music around 1997, but was very frugal and stringent in my spending habits. I would only buy CDs if I was convinced that the whole CD was full of good songs. I didn't want to be one of those kids who bought the Chumbawamba or Marcy Playground CDs just to listen to one song (Also I didn't really care for Sex & Candy). Thus, I made a lot of mixtapes at the time by not only recording music from the radio, but also hooking up a cassette deck to my VCR and VCR to the television to record songs from music videos (and hoping the video wouldn't be full of extraneous sound fx). I would also buy compilations of hit songs as opposed to wasting money on albums. In Canada, we had the Big Shiny Tunes compilations which basically consisted of all the big Alternative Rock hits of that year (and also the requisite Can-Con). Then the first big shift would happen at the very end of 1999 when our family got a new computer with Windows 98, a 56k Modem and a CD-Burner. (So long Windows 3.1!) I remember trying to get songs via search engines that would link to MP3s on FTPs that would rarely work, but then a friend told us about a little program called Napster and that changed everything. Now I was able to get any song that I wanted, even if it would take anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour to download and hog up our family’s phone line in the process. Being one of the first kids in my grade to have access to a CD Burner increased my popularity at school, as I was soon flooded with requests to make mix CDs for my fellow classmates. Of course one incident with downloading a song from NOFX about screwing chicks led my parents to make sure I wasn’t making CDs with any songs with bad words on them. Also as a side note, there is nothing embarrassing about liking Fatboy Slim. His music is fun and eclectic, and still features some of the most unique sampling that I have come across, and played a huge part in getting me interested in sampling, remixing, and mashups. In fact, among the very first songs I remember downloading from Napster were some mashups of the Rockafeller skank with Satisfaction by the Rolling Stones and My Name Is by Eminem. Those were my early steps into the world of mashups, several years before they would really take hold in the UK and subsequently the rest of the world. And if we don’t get my half assed mashups, we might not have Mouth Sounds. So throughout High School, from 2000-2003, most of my music consumption came from downloading music through various file sharing apps: Napster then Audio Galaxy then Kazzaa then Soulseek (was never really a big Limewire guy). As songs took a long time to download, and I lived in a small town in the middle of nowhere, most of my actual music discovery in those early days still came from whatever I heard on the radio or TV. So my Mix CDs, while eclectic and carefully expertly sequenced, were still full of a lot of the radio friendly hit singles of the day. Still, not many other kids in my class would have a CD that would go from Weird Al to Gob (The Canadian Green Day) to The Muppets to Moby to Alice Cooper. Also, I still had a rule that if I ended up really liking several songs by an artist, I would go ahead and actually buy the album, which is how I would end up getting into Weezer’s Blue Album, half a year before they would return with their slightly underwhelming comeback of The Green Album. But one fun thing about a lot of those early file sharing programs is that you could check out what other people were sharing, and discover some new stuff from there. Or you would find a copy of Hyakugujyuichi that was miscredited to Jimmy Buffett. Then in my college years (2003-2007), I would drift away from making mix CDs, and more towards filling up CD-RWs with 200 or so songs that I could listen to on my CD Discman that could play MP3 CDs during Christmas. Because I now had high speed Internet, I could download stuff much faster and dig a lot more into finding more obscure stuff. This would lead me into expanding and forming my tastes, and actually finding full albums that I would pay for, if they were only easier to find as opposed to only released in Japan. This was also the era where a lot of my music discoveries were being made second hand through mashups that I would find. Also, instead of making mix CDs, my love for making elaborate playlists would move into me having live Internet radio show where music would be streamed at incredibly low bitrates of like 24kpbs. This is also the era where I would gravitate away from the radio and more towards what was being praised on music review websites. I feel like even now, music criticism and discourse is still a lot more album focused than it is single focused. People will make a bigger deal at whatever scores an album gets from Pitchfork or some bald tool with glasses, than they will praises for individual tracks. A lot of canonization and consensus still forms more around albums, so if you’re a young music lover, there’s a good chance you might start taking deeper dives through listening to full acclaimed albums as opposed to songs. So in an era where the general music buying populace was downloading individual songs via iTunes, I was starting to get more interested in full albums, because I now was getting a better handle of what I liked. In my last year of college, I would get an iPod, but I never really made the jump to paying for downloads. Paying for a format I was already getting for free seemed like a step back. If I was going to pay for music, I would rather have a physical product. So counterintuitively, with getting an iPod, I actually started paying for physical CDs. After graduating from college, I now had a real job with a real source of income and no longer felt like I could use the “poor college kid” excuse for pirating music. This is coincidentally around the same time a lot of music stores in Canada are closing down, so I’m able to get a ton of CDs for real cheap from stores going out of business, as well as library music sales. And I’m able to make more discoveries for music that I like via YouTube. This is also the point where I’m able to buy more CDs because I now have a credit card that allows me to make purchases online and seek out stuff on eBay and Amazon that I’m not going to be able to find at local stores. So in this era (2007-2014), I’m still downloading a lot of odds and ends, but I’m able to make more informed purchase decisions and buy stuff I really like. Likewise, from around 2007-2011, I’m also buying a lot more DVDs, because I’m discovering what I like and have the money to pay for it. Also I get my first smartphone in 2011, but I don’t really use it as my primary listening device due to battery issues and the hassle of putting music on your phone. Getting Spotify in 2015 sees another shift in my music consuming habits. I’m downloading a lot less (which was also happening before in the brief period from around 2009-2012 or when Grooveshark was a thing), but I’ve kinda stopped buying CDs as well. Instead, I start getting into buying vinyl, which was happening as far back as 2010, but starts to really kick into gear around here. Though a lot of my vinyl purchases tend to be based around what I find at local thrift stores, or what I can get on sale for a good price. Rarely do I pay over $25 unless it’s something I really want, and rarely am I buying something I already own on CD unless it’s all time classic like The Avalanches’ Since I Left You. I’m also a strange person in terms of how I use Spotify in that I am more likely to listen to full albums than I am to add songs to playlists. Like a lot of my playlists will just be several albums in a row so that I don’t have to manually swap between albums. There are exceptions, like my playlist of a very specific kind of Mid to Late-90s Alternative Rock sound that was heavily influenced by Beck, but also Sublime: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/29OSMeThq1N86C0P7cBSxi?si=baa08c8cba7147d8, or my list of incredibly obnoxious late 90s pop: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4govXIa7clPPfjxgthASlH?si=403b85426be24c3d. That being said, while my CD buying has decreased, I do still listen to a lot of the ones I have via my car, and occasionally I will grab some CDs from a local thrift store when all I can find in the Vinyl section are Nana Mouskouri. Even though I will use my phone to listen to music via bluetooth, plopping a CD in the car is still a lot easier. Lot less hassle dealing with volume levels of two different devices, or things not connecting properly, or my phone wanting to play what I was watching on Youtube instead of Spotify. I can just let it play, and when I turn my car back on, it’s playing right away again. Listening to this podcast, though, I came to the realization that most of my physical media that I do buy now is music based, whereas I stopped buying DVDs for the most part around 2011 or so when I got Netflix. But looking at where things are currently heading, perhaps Movies and TV shows are the physical media that I should really worry about. There are a handful of Music streaming services and, for the most part, they all have the same content. There would be occasional instances where Beyonce or Taylor Swift would only have their albums on TIDAL or something, but those are becoming increasingly rare. You don’t have individual labels owning entire streaming platforms in the same way that Movie and Television studios do. There’s less concern of content being shuffled around or taken off entirely in regards to music as their is to video. It’s not nearly as fractured. Also I don’t have to worry as much about how the availability of things is different between Canada and the United States, and I have to go hunting around to find out where something is even streaming over here. Like if I hear something is on HBO Max or Hulu, I am scrambling to even know if I can watch it in Canada. It might be on Crave. It might be on Disney +. It might not be available at all. As for the future, we might all be listening to AI generated music and watching AI generated movies. Anyways this has been a long self indulgent ramble. I’m starting to sound like one of those Boomers in the comments section of an article series about Billboard Number 1s from the 70s, reminiscing about times gone by. Though speaking of sounding like things, I would like to close off this rambling post with the bizarrely specific stray observation that Ming Doyle’s voice sounds a lot like that of Betty Felon’s and that clearly all thirtysome partially Asian comics adjacent women who have lived in the Somerville, Massachusetts area all sound the same. Like if you were both on a podcast together it would be very confusing.