Common Music Recording formats And How they Changed the Way We Listen To Our Favorite Albums

The way we listen to music has evolved from the days of making instruments out of the supplements of nature like our hunter gatherer ancestors did. Items for this ranged from sticks and twigs to different types of shells found in the wilderness. This happened up until the 1800s when humans were finally able to make music with other objects like guitars and fiddles. Once this technology came out we started seeing the terms band and group become common place in the field of the fine arts. One of the earliest recording formats can credited to the reel to reel tape, Alexander Graham Bell made recordings off of this to formulate his idea for the common communication device known as the telephone. This format also gave artists a chance to play their songs and have audio playback for the first time.

Gradually we started seeing things like the cassette tape introduced in the 1980s with the option to rewind and fast forward to a certain spot in a recording. Though fragile in the composition of this particular media do to it’s ability to unravel in a player, the cassette still gave a decent sound to listeners of all ages. For those who wanted more of the stereo listening experience there was the vinyl cylinder that went into a player that held the record in place spinning over and over until the album was through.

These types eventually evolved into the well known disk record with a stylus that picked up sound from the grooves where the audio is stored. Then in the 1970s you also had the 8-track tape which was a lot bigger then the cassette. The way you worked these players is by sticking a huge tape inside and it would automatically start playing. The tape would stick out from the player so you always saw the label on an album at all times.

When the early to mid 1990s came CDs(for Compact Disks) came out with a new take on audio giving a digital sound to listeners. The CD player uses a laser to read code that is recorded into the disk and picks up the tracks for playback. My first boom box AM/FM stereo that I had there was a CD player and I remember making mixtapes and playing them back. Sometimes these would have up to 21 tracks. Computers in the early 2000s had a CD burner that you stuck a recordable disk into and using software like Nero or Windows Player you essentially become your own DJ and create a mix of different genres from Country to 80s Rock.

Then we moved to Ipods in the mid 2000s which stored digital MP3 files to play on a portable device you could use with earbuds or headphones. You chose files just like you were recording a CD but you had a download button for the files on software like Rhapsody or Apple Music which now has a streaming service.

That all led up to today’s streaming platforms like Amazon and Spotify where we play songs off of the internet. I hope to see more advancements in the future.

-Tristan