I was reading someone’s post recently about what they called their seven eras of music delivery and noticed that I also have seven, although mine are different. They are:

1. the 8-track-tape-cartridge era
2. the era of the 45-RPM 7-inch vinyl single
3. the cassette-and-12-inch-LP era
4. the CD era
5. the early days of downloading, before the MP3, with the UNIX format .au files
6. the peak era of downloading: MP3s
7. the era of streaming and ultra-expensive vinyl

Era 1: My earliest memories of recorded music are of 8-track cartridges that my parents and I listened to in the car. It was on these strange storage devices, the primary feature of which, I was told, was that they could skip from the middle of a song to the middle of another song with the push of a button, that I first heard Santana (off this compilation), Demis Roussos (this exact release, from which the songs I remember best are My Only Fascination and Lovely Lady of Arcadia), The Beatles’ She Loves You, Simon & Garfunkel’s El Condor Pasa and Cecilia, Fredrick Davies & Lewis Anton’s Astrology Rap, The Emotions’ I Don’t Wanna Lose Your Love, and a few selections form the musical Cabaret. I didn’t know any English at that time—I still remember the gobbledygook phonetic lyrics I sang along to She Loves You. (Şilagzu, if you can read Turkish.)

Each of those songs is still magical to me.

Era 2: At the age of 3, I’m told, I wanted the household record player to be placed in my room. At first, I mostly listened to the records of children’ stories my parents had bought for me. (Here’s an image of one, at least until it is sold and the page is no longer there.)

Then, sometime between the ages of 6 and 10, my mother and I once stayed at my aunt and uncle’s boat which was moored at the marina of a hotel on the Mediterranean, outside Antalya. Almost every night, the open-air disco would, at some point, feature the song LE FREAK by Chic. Each night, if it had not already been played while we were sitting at the outdoor disco’s dinner area, I would refuse to go to bed until I heard it. I also had gobbledygook phonetic syllables attached to that song (Frigav). That word happened to be mildly reminiscent of the name of the ice-cream bars you could only get during the intermission at a movie theater: the Alaska Frigo. The aluminum wrapper would send a terrible shock through your teeth.)

I had also taken over my parents’ 7-inch 45-RPM singles at this point: I had two singles by my favorite singer (favorite, that is, until I heard Chic) and one by my second-favorite singer. (I have yet to finish finding all six songs on MP3 or something rippable to MP3. As of early 2025, there’s one to go.)

Then, sometime around age 11 and shortly after my father died of cancer, my mother must have bought some compilation LPs of pop songs because I was suddenly listening to New Order, Shannon, The Romantics, Local Boy, Gary Low, Kajagoogoo, Indeep, Denise Edwards, Fox The Fox, Icehouse, Natasha King, Matthew Wilder, Gazebo, Chris de Burgh, Alphaville, and Madonna.

Some time after that, I went out and bought a few single-artist albums: Hot Dog by Shakin’ Stevens, the eponymous debut of (the band) Nena, and Michael Jackson’s Thriller, with Flashdance following soon afterwards. (I used to longingly stare at Purple Rain and Victory at stores, but those were always too expensive.)

In ninth grade one of our teachers arranged  a Xmas/NYE gift exchange. A classmate gave me the vinyl record of Brothers In Arms. To this day, I am very touched and grateful.

The other recording medium of this era was the cassette tape. And given how difficult it was to afford to buy LPs, most “record stores” primarily relied on another business model. They held only one copy of each record and they would make mix tapes for you from their collection. You would choose the length (and type: Chrome, etc.) of blank tape and pay a little more than the cost of the tape. You could specify everything you wanted to go onto the tape; you could specify some of it and leave the rest to them; or leave it all up to them (preferably after they’d gotten to know your taste). It was one of the ways we found out about music that was new to us (and typically, older than us).

You could also buy albums this way. I paid to have POWERSLAVE recorded onto a cheap cassette and my favorite birthday gift of my whole life is still the dubbed tape of Alphaville’s Forever Young my mom got me.

Era 4: CDs came a few years’ later to my part of the world than they did to the US. My first one was a Glenn Miller compilation, a present from my aunt. I was mesmerized by this shiny object with precise writing printed right on it. I wanted to eat it and worship it. I also remember sniffing it. (It smelled very good.)

My first five CDs still feel miraculous to me—fantastical otherworldly objects. And it continues to make me sad that so many of my friends would, in later decades, say things like “CDs are no good except as coasters.”

I still think they’re beautiful.

Era 5: Before anyone else had heard of downloading songs (that I know of), people doing work using UNIX systems started exchanging songs at some point in the mid-‘90s. This is how I became familiar with Björk (oodles of whose albums I’ve legally purchased since), Young MC, and the brilliant Ode to My Car by Adam Sandler, as well as some unidentified recordings of gamelan. I had to put them on a cassette to be able to listen to them at home. The resulting sound quality was atrocious, whether due to the tape or the .au encoding, I don’t know. By the way, I’m no audiophile. The best and most enjoyable music listening of my life was done on a mono handheld journalist-style cassette player. So, when _I_ think it sounds atrocious, it’s gotta be pretty bad.

Still, the music comes through. The brain makes sure of that. (I read on a discussion board that a music lover uses electronic equipment to listen to music while an audiophile uses music to listen to electronic equipment.)

Era 6: I have never downloaded off the original Napster, but one of the bands I was in, back when I was in three to six bands at any time, was being pirated on Napster (and getting royalty checks, too, from elsewhere—for an Australian movie). We felt pretty good about the Napster part.

Also, because I did not own an Apple device until around 2017, all my MP3s came from ripping my CD collection (and from a friend’s Nomad Zen, fully stocked with music from Jamaica and DRC, that he gave me one day, for reasons unknown). I spent most of 2002 and 2003, especially, ripping my CDs to MP3. Then, my favorite band started putting out MP3-only songs, so I started purchasing them, first at 7digital, with whom I’ve since had an unpleasant experience, and then on Qobuz (named after a Central Asian Turkic instrument, the kopuz).

Back in the early aughts, I also legally downloaded comedy from laugh.com, which seems to have disappeared long ago.

I’m still ripping (and still buying) CDs, though at a much lower rate than 20 years ago. These days, it’s because I prefer to do my own tagging. This not only avoids the typical “correcting” most database companies like to do to Portuguese song titles (which they Spanishize), but with the help of Discogs, I can locate the earliest print in the leading format of the time in the country of origin of the artist and thus know the definitive stylization for the album name and the song titles.

Era 7: I found out about Spotify in early 2008 from a friend who worked for CDBaby. I immediately looked it up. I was getting ready to make an account, but in those days I was still reading every word of every contract, agreement, document of terms and conditions, privacy statement, and such. I don’t remember now what I didn’t like about their policies but I did not make a Spotify account—and it turns out I was right. (Who could have guessed so much evil could come out of Sweden!)

I did stream from Tidal for a bit and then Qobuz briefly as well. I suppose streaming is fine if you’re not obsessed with music in the particular way that I am. For me, streaming was an anxiety-producing experience: What if I missed the name of an artist because I was busy with something else? I would have to go back. That would take away from whatever work I was trying to do and concentration I had managed to have. And what if I liked something so much that I wanted to make sure no merger, IPO, hostile takeover, or license change could take it away from me?

What if there’s so much stuff I like that I can’t function as a proper adult?

And that’s why I still buy physical media and then rip it (or purchase digital files on Bandcamp and Qobuz). I need to control the possibility of what I could listen to at any time. I want that full control right up to the moment I die.

Anyway, how about them vinyl releases? (or, as I heard some people say “vinyls” [yuck]… I just received marketing from Laufey that said “vinyls”… Needless to say I’m not buying that product.)

For a while, I was really happy with the upsurge in vinyl availability. That was back when they still came with download cards.

Have you noticed? The download cards are gone. Now, they really just expect you to pay US$35–65 for a single LP and pay more if you want it digital too. Or maybe they assume everyone is streaming, so this is a non-issue. But even streaming technology is going to be replaced by something else eventually. Maybe it won’t be era 8—maybe it’ll be more like era 15—but the streaming player will soon be replaced by an implant. And maybe it won’t stream from a server at all. Maybe we’ll all get an AI that makes up the music, the biographies and histories, the band and artist names, and everything else based on its reading of our brain waves. If it also controls our input and output ports, we could “interface” with friends who have “the same taste” in music and be discussing two entirely different fake songs, fake bands, or fake genres and not even know it because the two AIs handling our “quality time” together would sensor, filter, transform, and augment whatever the other person is saying to match what each of us would most enjoy hearing. If this sounds dystopian, think about our subjective sensory and affective experiences and how none of us has any idea (and could never have any idea) if the experiences we bond over are, to the other person, what we think they are. The philosophical term ‘qualia’ is a handle for realizing whether the question has any meaning. How could anyone—you, me, or a third party—ever know whether what I experience as the color blue is what you experience as the color blue? Maybe it’s your yellowish orange; maybe it’s your ‘sour taste’ or ‘dull pain’. Probably it’s neither. In any case, where in the chain of my sensory nerves would you have to insert yours to find out?

I don’t think there is any point of insertion at which this would work.

And I think this is similar to—in the frustration it can cause and in the realization it leads to—Gazzaniga’s point about free will: At which point along the chains of cause and effect would you want there to be this fully arbitrary freedom?

Let’s say you decide, as an exercise in free will, to refrain from urinating for as long as possible, resulting in urinating while making a presentation to the board of trustees or at a conference. Now, that would be an act of free will. How many of us are willing to do this?

I’ve always known my answer to the trolley problem. If I were to find myself in the circumstances of the trolley problem, I would be proof against free will. There are two possibilities: I pull the lever; I don’t pull the lever. (If you want to make it more general: I do the thing; I don’t do the thing—I intervene; I don’t intervene.)

If I do the one I believe I would, where’s the free will in that? That action was determined well in advance by the combination of my nature and nurture. After all, I’ve known about it for over a decade. And if I do the opposite, how would that be free will if some subconscious part of me suddenly acts in the opposite way of what I think I would do.

Either way, I clearly end up not having free will. So, maybe let’s not worry so much about the coming era of implants and sensory cocoons, with AIs repainting all our interactions with other entities to make us think we are connecting at a deep level while experiencing arbitrary AI hallucinations. We won’t know the difference.