At the mercy of the innovators

This first dawned on me in the late 1990s, when I gave a friend an audio cassette to listen to and she announced that there was no cassette player in her house. This was at a time when every gadget you bought came with a cassette deck. I had never really liked the format anyway — too difficult to find your way around, and they had a tendency to get chewed by the machine so you had to pick the tape out of the shell with a biro and a mass of plastic curls would announce the demise of your favourite music.

Nevertheless, cassettes were everywhere and I could hardly believe this woman didn’t have one. What she did have, though, was a young, technically minded husband who couldn’t bear to be behind the times. CDs had arrived and it was even possible to record on to them by that time, so he had banished the little audio dinosaurs from his smart-alec abode.

So, CDs became the norm and we all heaved our LPs up into the loft, where they would remain for ten years until we realised we would never again be sitting listening to an album with a 12-inch cardboard cover on our knees, and grudgingly sold them for peanuts in garage sales.

Then, my fellow sheep and I spent a few years congratulating ourselves on our extensive CD collections (a girlfriend once thought it pretentious that I had put mine in alphabetical order because there were so many I could never find the one I wanted). But guess what? They were obsolescent. While I, cool dad as I thought I was, was giving my teenage son CDRWs of songs I thought he might like, he was passing music to me on those things that nobody has ever succeeded in naming to the satisfaction of the whole world. Pen drives, flash drives, memory sticks, whatever you like to call them: audio devices began to feature a slot where you could insert one of these.

CDs were SO last year to some of these trend slaves. And around the same time, iTunes had introduced the concept of just having the music, without a cover, a label or any built-in information. Those of us who thrive on musical trivia felt underinsured. What about if we forget who played that solo or produced that particular track? Sure, we could go online and probably find out, but it wasn’t at our fingertips. And that felt wrong — still does, actually.

One idea that is still struggling to gain a foothold is the Spotify concept in which you don’t own a copy of the music at all. You can just access it, for a small fee, anywhere you have an internet connection.

It was the hippie movement and its half-baked successors that coined the expression “Property is theft”, and they didn’t mean it to apply to music. But that’s the way it is going. You can store your stuff “in the cloud” if that’s not too vague for you — so it’s not clogging up space on your computer and just waiting for a techno problem to wipe it out completely. The implication is that “the cloud” can never be destroyed, but who is to say there isn’t some maverick sitting there right now in his bedroom at his mother’s house in Arkansas, intent on destroying every note that Whitney Houston ever recorded because she’s the witch who blighted his life and ensured he would never have a girlfriend? We don’t know how he’s going to do it, but he’s got nothing better to do, so in between stints on particularly heavyweight porn sites he is gaining the knowledge and putting in the hours that will eventually reduce the world to a quivering, musicless jelly. That’s if the North Koreans don’t beat old Butane Wayne to it. You can be sure they’ve got their eyes on the contents of Barack Obama’s iPod, because as all cricketers know, if you can demoralise the captain, the rest of the team will follow.

In the hope that Wayne and Kim Jong-un are not targeting my own music collection, I recently looked into buying a new iPod, only to be confronted with the suggestion that this way of listening to my idiosyncratic favourites is on its way out. It seems we’re going to be doing that on our phones, like everything else.

But if that is the way to go, it’s time battery technology caught up. Isn’t there a way of using body heat to charge a phone? That, I’m afraid, is not progressive thinking. Because right after the demise of the iPod will come the abandonment of the phone as we know it. Let’s just hope the innovators like music too, or we’ll all have to learn the lost art of whistling.