How technology has affected music users and music consumers.
Music has existed for thousands of years in some shape or form, and is found in every known culture, past and present. However, with technology seemingly in every aspect of our lives in some shape or form, I am going to talk about how techonology has affected muisc for music listeneners, and for musicians themselves.
Music Consumers
Music used to be a thing that nobody would be able to listen to whenever they pleased. There were no tablets, phones, ipods, records, cd's, cassette tapes that people could just use and listen to music whenever they wanted to. From thousands of years ago, to as early as to a few hundred years ago.
The evolution of music has changed drastically in the last 100 plus years. The 20th Century saw a revolution in music listening as the radio gained popularity worldwide and new media and technologies were developed to record, capture, reproduce and distribute music. Music performances became increasingly visual with the broadcast and recording of music videos and concerts.
Music of all kinds also became increasingly portable. Headphones allowed people sitting next to each other to listen to entirely different performances or share the same performance. With the digital age taking over the world we live in today, music is at the head of that change. Everybody is able to stream/download any music they wish at the touch of a button. We have access to an unbeleiveable amount of music at our fingertips today, with this said it is the reason why record shops are going out of busisness now as everybody has a record shop simple in their pocket i.e. a smartphone.
Music Users
While it’s true that the rapid increase in computing power has changed the habits of the everyday end users around the world, quite possibly one of the biggest impacts has been in the realm of music recording technology.
Musicians have been able to make incredible leaps on what type of music is able to be created, and can be recorded in ways that we have never been able to before. One such example for recording musicians is the change from recording on analogue tape, to recording digitally. If a mistake was made the whole tape had to be scappred and started again form beginning. However, with digital recording, we simply can cut and edit each individual piece of recording and adjust it how we see fit. Giving musicians complete control over every second of music being recorded.
In the early 2000′s it was still possible to set up a home recording studio that could produce reasonably high quality music, but the costs and overheads involved would also have to match that same ‘quality’. Digital Audio Workstation software alone would typically be an expense few could justify, coupled with the required powerful systems loaded with dedicated digital signal processing chips meant that all but the most serious of musicians and producers were virtually left out of the loop.
During the decade the exponential increase in processing power and lowering costs of hardware, along with the explosion of fast broadband internet connections and dedicated websites for publishing music such as Soundcloud, have produced a new breed of musician/producer… one which club DJs have instant access to for example.
It may still be an expensive ‘hobby’ for those wishing to invest in higher-end software, but the new generation of software apps such FL Studio come in at a fraction of this cost. Software which can genuinely deliver high quality results, albeit with less features. A large part of this has certainly been due to the introduction of tablet computers that include sufficient processing power to handle the audio -masse & the editor without the need for expensive outboard or third party equipment. Tablets are now starting to feature as integral parts of DJ mixers in clubs as much as they do on coffee tables around the world, and MP3s are the standard music format. Literally anyone with a smartphone can be a DJ, and anyone with a tablet or laptop can be a music producer.
