Published: May 25, 2009 09:42 pm      

To hear music, just press ‘play’

Can you imagine living a day without music? Or having a month without your iPod or mp3 player? Just think of how the world would be if you were not able to hear your favorite song echo through a speaker. Well, the way that music players have branched out over the years, there are no worries for not having music by your side for generations to come.

For years, music has been a powerful tool for inspiration and enjoyment. However, music has been transformed in several different ways for people to enjoy the recorded sounds. But through the decades, music players today are as small as a pocket and as simple as just pressing the “play” button to get the music you love.

Let’s turn the clock back to where record players, or phonographs, were the “it” item of music players. From the late 1870s through the 1980s, record players were the most common device for listening to recorded sound. In the 1870s, the way to listen to music took some work than just pressing “play.” Instead, to receive music, people would have to crank the phonograph to hear popular music. However, record players soon turned to electricity and became a much easier way to listen to music. An album, or record, would be placed on the record player, while a needle was placed on the record, which would play music aloud. The record player soon shorted out in the late 1980s; a new product was then put out.

Stereo 8, or commonly known as the eight-track, was popular from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s. Eight-tracks were magnetic tape sound recordings that held eight parallel soundtracks, corresponding to four stereo programs. However, by the late 1982, eight-track cartridges were not carried in retail stores.

Besides the CD, many teenagers today still remember listening to music on cassette tapes. Cassettes consisted of two sides of tracks, which made the tape to be manually flipped or the machine itself change the direction of tape movement. Cassette tapes were quite popular between the early 1970s to the late 1990s.

Megan Linn, a senior at North Marion High School, remembers listening to old cassette tapes. “I listened to my mom’s old cassette tapes like Led Zeppelin and Nirvania.”

Along side the compact cassette, compact discs, or CDs, were popular among today’s teenagers and still are. CDs are optical discs used to store digital data, however, designed for storing digital audio. The CD was on market in October 1982 but presently remains the highest sale of commercial for audio recordings.

The new millenium opened up for the highly used MP3 player today, the iPod. First, a mp3 player stores, organizes and plays audio files. On Oct. 23, 2001, Apple Inc. launched the Ipod in stores and soon became the hit item. Apple Inc.’s product line consisted of iPod Classic, iPod Touch, iPod Nano and the iPod Shuffle. As of September 2008, more than 173 million iPods worldwide had been sold. From then on, the iPod has been considered the best-selling digital audio player in history.

Many teenagers cannot go a day without having their mp3 player or iPod by their side, including Chad Efaw, a junior at North Marion High School, who had this to say about his mp3 player: “I love my mp3 player because I can jam anywhere I want to.”

So, the question is, what does the future hold next? When asked what the next invention of music players will be, Sarah Satterfield, a senior at North Marion High School, replied, “I think that music players will be more compact and hold more music and features.”

Technology has grown drastically over the years, and obviously in the music field. The next creation of music players is unknown, but is sure an excitement awaited. So while the wait, hold onto your iPod, CD player, cassette tape, or any other music device that gets you through the day and just press “play.