Interesting Shifts in Music in My Time

When I was younger there were tapes, and the radio.  You’d listen to a station ALL day long just waiting for your favorite song to come on with your hand on or near the “record” button on your tape deck so you can get that song on tape and listen to it whenever you wanted!  MTV was just that… Music Television.  It would play music videos all day and night.  I remember hanging out with my friends at a house and just having MTV playing all day, like the radio.  When a song we liked came on we’d run in and watch the video and then return to whatever it was pre-teens/teens do, cause for the life of me I can’t remember what we did all day!

Next came CD’s and CD players, with a discman and some headphones you could really rock out to the songs you loved, anywhere and everywhere.  Soon, however, MTV started becoming less about Music, and more about shows.  Then it started getting worse… less music, more shows, and then even less music and more shows… until the only music videos left were on TRL (Total Request Live) and even then it was never the full video.  I started wondering if the need for artists to create music videos was dwindling.  Here was all this money they were putting into creating these fabulous looking videos, and there was no where they were playing!

Then Napster came on the scene.  You had the ability to download your favorite individual songs instead of buying the whole CD!  Of course ignore the fact that you were actually stealing the song.  🙂  Although the fall of Napster was quick and painful, the masses wouldn’t stand for buying CD’s anymore.  Mp3 players started hitting the scene, and then services started popping up offering individual songs for purchase.  So began another shift, where music was more digital then physical.

So, really what prompted this whole trip down memory lane?  I watched a music video again.  The video was great!  Where was it?  On MTV? uhhhh No.  On VH1? uhhhh again NO.  It was on YouTube.  It made me realize that now artists are making videos and putting them up on YouTube for people to watch.  It was an interesting moment for me watching that amazing video on YouTube and wondering how we got here.  I think it’s great, and really equals the playing field for new artists.  Let us not forget about poor Rebecca Black, the nobody teen who gained 150 MILLION views on her music video!

So, I leave you with a recent video from one of my favorite artists… Long live the music video!  Thanks YouTube for saving this dying art!

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