• Captain Aggravated
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    81 month ago

    I’m a millennial, so…

    I never had a record collection. When I was growing up they were considered old fashioned and obsolete, audiophiles were still clinging onto them muttering about how they sound “warmer” or whatever. My parents had records that I wasn’t really interested in.

    Cassettes were kind of my childhood. I owned a series of tape recorders and/or boom boxes with cassette decks, and went from children’s programming on cassette tape to recording music off the radio. Though I really did catch the tail end of the format.

    By the time I was a teenager, digital audio was all the rage. CDs were the gold standard of audio quality, maybe you still had a cassette deck in your car, and mp3s were the hot new thing. Everybody was pirating music on file sharing services. Everybody was playing around with Windows Media Player’s visualizer settings. Soon people were buying music from iTunes or subscribing to Pandora or Spotify.

    But given I remember hi-fi stereos in the late 90’s coming with turntables, cassette decks and CD players, you’d have to have been an idiot to repeatedly throw away your music collection as each format comes out especially given you could record mix tapes from vinyl and cassette, and it’s been fairly trivial to rip from all three formats to mp3 for pretty much the entire 21st century so far.