Cassette tapes, Walkmans, boomboxes, and the music stores we loved.
A tiny ad in the back of a magazine promised twelve CDs for a penny. Millions of people signed up. Almost none of them read the fine print about what came next.
Read more →For a few years at the turn of the millennium, five-part harmonies and synchronised choreography weren't just popular — they were close to the entire pop landscape.
Read more →A thousand songs in your pocket sounded like marketing hyperbole in 2001. It wasn't, and the little scroll wheel that let you get to any of them in seconds changed what carrying music around actually meant.
Read more →Before streaming, downloading music meant burning CDs from LimeWire and other file-sharing programs that followed Napster's shutdown — the messy, spyware-riddled way a generation got its music in the early 2000s.
Read more →Sony built a genuinely brilliant recordable music format in 1992. By every reasonable measure it should have won. It didn't.
Read more →A college dropout's dorm-room program let an entire generation download any song ever recorded for free — and nothing about music has been the same since.
Read more →Making a mixtape from cassette tapes took an entire afternoon in the 80s and 90s — a hands-on music ritual a 30-second Spotify playlist can't replace.
Read more →They smelled like plastic and carpet and possibility. The great music retail stores were more than shops — they were the places music actually lived.
Read more →Long before vinyl became a statement, it was just how music worked — and the record shop was the centre of the musical universe.
Read more →CDs promised perfect, eternal sound. They delivered something more complicated — and more beloved — than that.
Read more →The boombox was the big, portable 80s stereo speaker you carried on your shoulder to blast music in public — a look back at the hip-hop and street-culture era that made it iconic.
Read more →Before earbuds and streaming, a small cassette player with foam headphones changed what music could mean — and who it could belong to.
Read more →Before Spotify playlists, there were cassette tapes — and the art of making the perfect mixtape was a cultural institution all its own.
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