It’s time to reminisce about some memories from the past through this musical throwback. This article is based on my personal childhood experience of the various sources through which I used to listen to music. The timeline may not be completely accurate for the Western world but is true for most of India.
A Throwback to the 90s
The 90s and the 2000s were one of the most significant periods for the social landscape of India. The most enabling factor for this change was technology. There’s no denying how different our lives are now as compared to, say, 20-25 years ago.
This makes the 90s kids of India an endearingly unique generation. I am proud to be a part of the 90s kids’ community. We can easily boast that for our generation, life has been a lot more exciting than the previous generations and the ones that followed.
Our generation wasn’t dependent on technology a lot back then. The options that we had were few but we knew how to maximize our joy from whatever we had. Staying inside the house was usually considered boring, until the advent of computers and mobile phones of course.
The same technological transformation changed the way we listened to music over the years. With the help of this article, I hope to make you nostalgic about our childhood. Let’s revisit the different modes and sources that we had in our lives back then for listening to music through this musical throwback.
Music channels on TV
One of my first interactions with the world of Music was through TV channels. Do you remember the weekly show on Doordarshan called ‘Chitrahar’ ? It is the earliest memory that I have of listening to music on TV.
We also had MTV, B4U, 9X, 9XM, and others. ‘Bakwas bandh kar’, or The Bade Chhote Show was a hit among the kids.
Source: Filmykeeday
Drop a list of the music channels on TV that you liked as a kid in the comments section.
Audio Cassettes and Boomboxes
I can never forget Audio cassettes. Long reels of magnetic tape that could hold almost 10 to 12 songs, the audio cassette technology was like a music CD for us back then. I would listen to new songs on TV and then visit a music store with a blank cassette to get my favourite songs recorded as a mixtape.
Cassette players used to be huge and bulky when they first came out. During those days there was hardly any emphasis on the size of the gadget. It was the experience that mattered.
That’s why these ‘boomboxes’ came to represent the urban culture and society. They were instrumental in the rise of Hip-Hop music. It was the best gadget around for instant celebrations; to kickstart a little dance party, or maybe a face-off, right in the middle of the street. This shows why Boomboxes had a fanbase of their own.
The Walkman
In layman terms, the ‘walkman’ was a portable music player that lets you listen to music on the move. Sony came up with this brilliant device that completely changed the way people listened to music. The Walkman was first released in 1979. It was introduced as the ‘Soundabout’ in the US and as the ‘Stowaway’ in the UK.
After trying a few names the company settled for the ‘Walkman’.
It became ridiculously famous in the 80s and the 90s, so much so that these could well have been called the Era of the Walkman. By the 90s it had revolutionized the whole music industry.
MP3 Players and iPod
The first mp3 players to have come out had limited storage capacity (32 – 512 MB). The upside was that they fit in the palm of your hand, and still held a greater number of songs than an audio cassette.
Apple changed the game when it introduced the iPod in 2001. The iPod wasn’t just a music player, it was a music lover’s paradise.
It had a display screen, could play several audio file formats, was compatible with iTunes, and had a massive storage capacity – upwards of 5 GigaBytes (storage capacities varied depending upon the model). Some of the later models even had a few video games.
Be it iPod Classic, Mini, Shuffle, or the iPod Touch, this technological marvel altered the status quo when it came to listening to music. The iPod was so immensely popular that the iPhone had to wait for at least 3 years after its launch to surpass iPod sales.
The Inbetweeners - PCs, Laptops, CDs, and DVDs
In between mp3 players, iPods, and Mobile phones, there were times when we used our personal computers as our primary source for listening to music. This may not be the case for all of us, but I am sure a lot of people loved piling up songs and discographies of their beloved artists on their computers.
My first PC was an Intel Pentium II, with a 128 MB RAM and a 32 GB hard disk. There was barely any space for storing music on this PC. The worst thing was that it had a Read-Only drive that wasn’t designed to write data on disks. I had to get a DVD writer installed on my CPU. This way I was able to create custom mixtapes on blank CDs and DVDs.
This CD/DVD collection is one of the most prized possessions that I have from my childhood.
I used ‘Nero’ for ‘burning’ data on disk drives. Which software did you use?
Apart from CDs and DVDs, I also visited Internet cafes, and spent hours on downloading music. At some point, the cafe owner would start noticing the huge amount of data that was getting transferred. I had to switch to a different cafe whenever this happened.
My CD/DVD Collection
Then came pen drives. Pen drive was a crazy gadget for me. It would take hours to write data onto a CD, but with a pen drive, the transfer speeds were unbelievable. People could now easily exchange music, videos, movies, and you-know-what.
I did all of this just to listen to music. Damn! Those were really tough times.
Mobile Phones
We can still use our laptops or PCs for listening to music but for a majority of us, they’re not the most preferred medium.
Mobile phones had become the one-stop solution for all our music needs by the late 2000s. There was a heavy inflow of cell phones in the market from various brands and companies. Some phones were specially designed with features that would attract music lovers (Remember Nokia Xpress Music?).
Back then we used to get only 1-2 gigabytes of internet per month. The data packs were usually priced at around 90-100 bucks, sometimes even lower. We had to be extra vigilant with how we were spending our data. Will you be able to live today if you got to use only about 30-40 MB of data in a day? (The answer is no. If you said yes, you’re a psychopath.)
We Indians have never really liked paying for our music (that’s true for almost everything else). How many of you can recall downloading music for free from sites like ‘songs.pk’ or ‘mp3skull’ ?
I have a joke on sites like these but it’s probably illegal so I’ll just skip it.
Special Mention: Radio
I was not a big fan of listening to music on a radio, but before the 90s, it was the Radio that was the best friend of a music lover in our country. Our parents and grandparents listened to most of their music through FM channels. Every middle-class household had a radio that blasted songs, news or live cricket commentary all day.
Radio stations had some wonderful music based programs – you could call them podcasts of the old – and they were super fun and enjoyable. People used to dedicate songs to their loved ones through their favorite music shows and RJs.
I used to tune in to the radio only when there was no electricity, so I kind of know how it felt when the only source of electronic media that you could access had only audio and no visuals.
My parents still love listening to the radio. They can hardly bear to plug in an earphone for more than 15 minutes. That’s something our generation needs to do more in our lives. Saregama Caravan has done a great job of relaunching the radio for the modern Indian.
I gifted one of these to my parents in 2018. No brownie points for guessing how much they loved it.
Music today - Compressed digital audio and streaming
Today we have apps where we can easily stream the music that we wish to listen to. For something that we can’t find on Apple Music, Spotify, Gaana, Saavn, etc, there will always be a lonely Youtuber that would have already uploaded the audio of that song on Youtube. No one bothers about downloading music anymore because there’s no point. But the era of downloaded music was fun. I kind of miss it sometimes.
In a span of 20 years, our generation has seen a huge shift in the media through which we access our music. There was a time when people would carefully curate and select the albums they want to listen to. They’d spend a lot of time and effort listening to that album. Someone get me a Gramophone, please!
That album culture is now vanishing (There has never been a proper album culture in India in the first place, to be honest). This is because full-length albums don’t fit the needs of the modern music lover anymore. Except for maybe a few select music enthusiasts.
An Anecdote
By the time I reached the final year of my college, I had amassed a massive collection of audio songs. The total size of the collection was upwards of 1300 Gigabytes. Sadly that external hard disk crashed one day, and this happened when I was in my final semester. I was graduating after 2 months. And there was no way I could have downloaded 1.3 TB of music again in 2 months. It hurts to see your hard drive crashing like that, doesn’t it?
Conclusion
In the end, music is an inseparable part of our lives. I think we need to appreciate the fact that today music has become readily available and is easily accessible. Imagine you have a tune in your head, and you can’t figure out to which song the tune belongs to. 15 years ago, this would have been a nightmare. You’d have to ask everyone in the family, maybe even call up your friends for help. All the music that we could have ever asked for, is now just a few clicks away.
I hope that you enjoyed the article and that I was able to represent our childhoods in the purest form possible. If you liked the piece then please spare a few seconds to leave a comment and share it with your friends and family on whichever social media platform that you can.
Thank you for being a part of this. See you next time. Till then, stay musicable!