This and That

Technology is an always growing monster, but the good kind like in Monster’s Inc. There are very few industries that have been effected by technology more than the music industry. In my lifetime alone there was the invention of the record button to make mix tapes with my ridiculously sized boom box off the radio, the Compact Disc, mp3s and my personal favorite the external USB friendly hard drive which is a great tool for storing obscene amounts of music digitally.

Napster

Looking back on the history of the music technology tango, we have Napster who came onto the scene in the mid-late 90s and is still seen as one of the pioneers of the getting new music into people’s hand movement and they did it by way of peer to peer file sharing. Similar technologies are used today in the way of BitTorrent and online file sharing (senspace, mediafire, rapidshare, etc.) and it continues to evolve due to the growing popularity of the personal mp3 player(iPod, Zune, etc.) As a music fan there is always music a few clicks away, which translates to Life is Good!

The band Dispatch greatly benefited from Napster’s infiltration of the college market and were able to grow to become one of the nation’s most popular unsigned (by choice) bands. The Grateful Dead, Phish & the jamband music scene as a whole grew exponentially off the back of its fans sharing their music. Originally it was the classic B+P where you’d send someone blank tapes and enough money for postage and they’d make a copy of the show and send it back to you. These were very popular especially with list service groups. I know I made a lot of trades back in the day via rec.music.phish and The Phish Bowl on AOL. Now through BitTorrent and sites like etree.org and the Live Music Archive it is even easier to get shows right after they happen, the previous way could take weeks to get you your favorite show from someone’s list. Now we have instant gratification. (more…)