End of an Era, postscript

Some more thoughts as a follow-on to the previous post...

Monday Lisa needed to bring a cassette tape to her violin lesson, and Yumiko had to look around several stores before she could find one to buy.

It occurs to me that at the same time the record industry is whining about Internet-based piracy and other file sharing, the era of easy audio recording has quietly faded away -- a lot of audio devices these days no longer have cassette decks, and the once-ubiquitous cassette tape is rapidly becoming a thing of the past.

For many, many years I kept a running record of currently popular music.  I would always keep a cassette tape loaded and ready, and when something I liked came on the radio, it was a simple matter to punch "record" and save a copy for future listening.

As new audio streams came into being -- we had DMX feeds at work for a while, and then still later the streaming audio of Internet radio -- the paradigm remained the same.  Keep a tape loaded and ready, punch the record button when something cool came on.

Piracy?  The recording industry would say so, but then they live in a bubble of their own little reality where laws like the Audio Home Recording Act don't exist, and radio broadcasts themselves are piracy.

The reality is that after listening to a song a few times, I typically either grew tired of it, or more likely decided I liked it well enough to buy it.  Those old from-radio tapes are fun to listen to now as a time capsule, but most of the songs are redundant with CDs I now own.

This effect was even more pronounced with Japanese music.  Here in the U.S., there's really not much chance for hearing new Japanese music other than Internet radio, and taping from an Internet stream is a great way to give music a trial run, to listen to it enough to get to like it enough to shell out some yen for it.

Sorry, took a detour there.  The point is, cassettes are fading away, and it's getting harder to build a casual collection of music.

Or record a violin lesson.  Or record kids' piano recitals.  Or record oral life histories.

Maybe what we need is a good recording accessory for iPods?