A bit of background, I grew up listening to music. Lots of it. There weren’t many instances where I wasn’t wired up to something.
Read that in context and it makes more sense.
I am a child of the cassette tape. I missed the first vinyl phase of seventies, but was bang in the middle of the C90. I had loads of tapes with all my favourite albums, bands and songs. An eclectic range of music including Michael Jackson, Guns N Roses and random stuff sneakily taped from the radio.
The amount of walkman’s I got through attending school and riding my bike around town, always getting battered and bruised, bashed and broken. Then there is the personal pride in having a walkman with a digital display and buttons on the front. Oh the joy!
Time moves on, and along came the humble CD. It was a sad day where the end was announced for the cassette, but that soon passed. CD’s were a huge step forward for the home music collection, if anything it was very aesthetically pleasing. Bit of a bugger though for us Walkman users.
The portable CD player was rubbish. Any slight movement out of the ordinary like being knocked by a passer-by, or falling off a chair (from previous experience) just makes the disc jump and stop playing. Which in turn can then scratch the disc and render it useless. I wasn’t a fan of them.
This became even more noticeable when my music collection grew. Luckily, the walkman still played a part. Before the rise and rise of Apple and the iPod’s, the stop gap measure was to record all your CD’s onto cassette tape! The best of both worlds!!
True, a laborious job, but at least your music was portable again.
The reason for this reminisce is obviously due to the news of HMV. The death of physical music approacheth. I recall spending many an hour or day in an HMV store looking through all the CD’s, noticing all the names of bands that I’ve never heard and delving into the bargain bin to unearth a true gem.
HMV was also a very good place for the ‘non-mainstream’ strand of music. If, like me, you were very much a ‘grebo’ or ‘heavy metaller’ this shop was like heaven. You could often find all those weird bands recommended to you by friends (in my instance it was a school chap called Andy, he very much cost me a fortune by changing my taste in music!).
Despite the fact that HMV used to charge £17 for a CD that wasn’t in the charts, it will still be greatly missed by a lot of people. But it does indicate the end to so called ‘physical’ music. With everything going digital and cloud based, the humble CD is doomed. Another era of my childhood coming to an end. Christ, I feel old.
Rest In Peace, HMV.
PS. What happens to the dog?
Related articles
- HMV – The end of an era? (fatsoforgetso.wordpress.com)
- HMV calls in administrators (thesun.co.uk)
- HMV: A visual history (bbc.co.uk)
That Makes Two 