The 90s kids would remember collecting cassettes. It was a rigorous process. We shared cassettes, caught up with music videos playing on television, followed up with physical stores, and ensured that the music reflected our taste before investing money. It was a serious process that cost us a serious share of our pocket money and time. It reflected our personality and helped us make new friends and build stronger bonds with the old ones. We also painfully recorded songs, making mix albums and gifting those to our heartthrobs. Remember how we also showed off our collections to our friends and family? Those were the times.
The cassettes made way for the CDs and the DVDs. Nothing changed much then except for the scale, cost, and storage format. You could save more songs now. You could also rewrite some of the DVDs. Sharing and collecting became easier. We had DVDs dedicated to genres of music or artists. As you like, please! The recording and the gifting of DVDs did not stop. We got worried if there were any scratches on the surface of the CDs. It broke our hearts every time a CD started malfunctioning. We used soap-water and what not to keep them all clean and running!
The pen drives and the hard drives are still part of our lives now. In their heyday, you would find teenagers collecting songs, videos, and films (especially the naughty ones) on pen drives and hard drives without a care for the computer viruses that had also made way into our lives silently. The collection would be neatly organised into artists and genres. Friends borrowed these storage devices to keep a copy of a copy of a copy. All pirated. Indians could not care less for copyright. The world had exploded.
Now, you do not have to collect. You do not even need to store and hoard. There is no need to share. Artificial Intelligence does the vetting and organising for you. It even suggests the music you would like. If you want to share some music with an old friend of yours or the world, you just need to share the link or the QR code on Spotify. You can listen to artists around the world alone or with your entire tribe, no matter where in the world they are situated. The switching costs have never been so low. As a teenager, I had these specific genres I listened to, specific artists. I knew where the artists were travelling to or what their next album would be. Now I don’t have to. I wonder if it is because I am in my 30s or if this phenomenon is ubiquitous.
Do you remember how there would be that special friend who had the best collection of music and was given responsibility for having a never-ending collection ready for the picnic? Or how we used to praise that one friend in our group who had the most neatly organised exhaustive collection of music and videos? Those friends and people are not required any more. Their skills have become redundant now akin to how the skills of factory workers and even programmers become redundant sometimes. Alexa and Siri have replaced all of them. The organiser, the collector and the hoarder are dead.
“Alexa! Play a sad song.”
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