The Romance of the Mixed Tape Is Replaced by the Isolating Oblivion of the iPod

 

 

 

 

 

 

Addressing the end of the Walkman cassette, Ed S writes:

The walkman originated a new type of music sharing: the Mix Tape. Didn't you ever carefully put together a cassettetape of favorite songs for someone you liked or loved, or had someone do the same for you? That's missing from the ipod experience. The smartphone and ipod/pad screens are causing more narrowly-focused people than the walkman did. You can see eveyone staring at a tiny screen now, oblivious to the sights and sounds of the real world around them. That's true isolation.

Comments

[brandon]

I still bust out my old mix tapes once in a while - I made most of mine back in the 1990s and recorded music straight from the radio. I must have about 30 cassettes altogether. There's something about listening to those old tapes that takes me back in time, from the radio jingles between songs to the sub par radio reception at times, and that's an experience that can't be replicated through an mp3.

[Chris]

I did the same thing Brandon. I guess that Apple was hoping for a mix-take analogue with the idea of playlists. The genius playlist builder is pretty nifty.

[Doug]

What???

This is simply hard to swallow. We have more mp3s than ever before: many bands releasing their own mp3s, many individuals making their own podcasts. The tools enable us all to make our own MP3s easily -- and we can share them much more easily than we could before too. I suspect that many more individuals now are involved in making and distributing music and spoken word recordings than in the cassette tape era -- and certainly they are spread further as well.

If you want to talk about people being disconnected from their immediate reality, then are many culprits to blame (such as cell phones and the Internet) -- I don't think the decline of the cassette tape is one of them.

[bill bush]

The importance of music and connection in society is, I think, behind the responses to this recently much-commented issue. When I commented about the lack of a Grundig/Telefunken elegant table radio, several comments arose, and the demise of the tape Walkman is also getting responses. The group listening experience and sharing do still exist, but $ has become a new element in the social mix. Mixtapes were no threat to the music industry. They were too time-consuming for individualized ones. Of course there were those of us who had/have double decks with a dub function. Still the produced numbers were of little to no consequence.

Internet radio is offered as a replacement for the big table radio, and I can see it working. It amounts to using newer technology to achieve much the same ends. It also de-localizes, which is one of the purposes of listening to radio. BTW, the responses on higher-end audio were interesting. Magneplanar speakers starting at $595 look nice, but I don't expect them at the yard sales anytime soon. (Nice Kenwood receiver for $5 two weeks ago, though. Stop me before I buy again!)

Certainly we could give/exchange flash drives of mp3s.. They're cheap enough. I would think that, from the artists' viewpoint, the money issue with mp3 "sharing" seems to have some traction. (Yes, I have read articles/studies saying mp3 "sharers" buy more music than other people. Is there anything definitive?) Sharing is something I would expect to see among friends or with fellow travelers on the highway. Sending code to mutually opportunistic unknowns seems different to me. But then, I still buy cds.

Maybe I just have a nostalgic yen for those deco and '50's modern radios. The look reminds me of people and places lost. But the love of music and the memories it brings have brought many of us together here. Thanks for the time and space.