Torben Grut
Member
So, I recently found this amazing http://awesometapesfromafrica.blogspot.com/ blog that most of you perhaps already know. Plenty of interesting obscure african music I can totally recommend, and supposedly most of it recorded on tape.
Apart from downloading some fifteen hours of nothing short of splendid music, it got me thinking on the way we normally think about formats/mediums for recorded music. I guess the core question I ended up with was: how well spread is the global cassette culture? The obvious answer that cassettes were eradicated with the introduction of the recordable CD, might well be much too simplified.
This, I stress, while pointing to historian of technology Dave Edgertons excellent book "The Shock of the Old". If we count the actual number of listeners having cassettes as their prime source for music listening, don't we come up with totally different facts on music consumption?
In his book, Edgerton presents a way of thinking about technology that I found very convincing and thoughtful. Stressing the notion of how we, instead of focusing on the stuff we've invented, should focus on what we are using (and in the "we" we should count the entire global population). By doing so we are able to distance ourselves from this silly idea that we live in a world of constant invention, and instead realise the amount of actual things we surround ourselves with and take for granted. For example, corrugated iron should be a lot more talked about than the V2 rocket or the Concorde, to repeat the example used in the link above.
Anyhow, applying this thinking on formats of recorded music, what does this mean to our views of how music is consumed? Does anybody have some hard facts?
Apart from downloading some fifteen hours of nothing short of splendid music, it got me thinking on the way we normally think about formats/mediums for recorded music. I guess the core question I ended up with was: how well spread is the global cassette culture? The obvious answer that cassettes were eradicated with the introduction of the recordable CD, might well be much too simplified.
This, I stress, while pointing to historian of technology Dave Edgertons excellent book "The Shock of the Old". If we count the actual number of listeners having cassettes as their prime source for music listening, don't we come up with totally different facts on music consumption?
In his book, Edgerton presents a way of thinking about technology that I found very convincing and thoughtful. Stressing the notion of how we, instead of focusing on the stuff we've invented, should focus on what we are using (and in the "we" we should count the entire global population). By doing so we are able to distance ourselves from this silly idea that we live in a world of constant invention, and instead realise the amount of actual things we surround ourselves with and take for granted. For example, corrugated iron should be a lot more talked about than the V2 rocket or the Concorde, to repeat the example used in the link above.
Anyhow, applying this thinking on formats of recorded music, what does this mean to our views of how music is consumed? Does anybody have some hard facts?
