The Morden Ways To Listen To Music

The way that we listen to music and the devices that we play it on seem to change almost from generation to generation. This article gives us a brief overview of how we've listened to music through the ages.

The gramophone was essentially a record player that played music by running a needle through the groove of the record. Because of the size of the records and the gramophone it was extremely difficult to listen to music on the go with this device and as a result we tended to listen to it just at home or at a public gathering.

The cassette - or tape - was a huge step forward for music as it meant that all of a sudden people could make their own tapes, simply by recording music off the radio or making their own compilations from already owned music. While piracy is an affliction that troubles the music industry even today, back then there was very little that could be done about it and the tape player was the medium by which this crime became widespread.

As the name suggests, a Walkman was a portable device that was small enough to clip onto a belt or even fit in a pocket. Essentially they were simply cassette players - and that is what they played - that were very small and ran on battery power.


The CD player started to become the choice of music player for people in the late eighties and early nineties, primarily because the quality of the music they played was so much better than that used by tapes. Copying music onto a CD was much harder, however, and this meant that often people owned both a CD player and a Walkman so that they could listen to music on the go as well as in better quality at home.


Early in this millennium IPods started popping up, which had a very high quality of sound on them and also gave the owner the ability to mix music as they liked. It also meant that an entire music collection could all of a sudden be stored on one small device, saving the owner plenty of space. Of course, since then people have started to store all their music on their phone as well, as the evolution of music continues.
As you can see there have been huge developments as to how we listen to music over the last few generations: how do you think your children will listen to music?