'I do it my way' - the MP3 is 10 years old

Published on Thursday 27 March 2008 20:04

IT'S 10 years since the MP3 player appeared and revolutionised how we buy and listen to our favourite tunes. But not all music lovers dig the digital gizmo: for some it's all about the crackle of the needle, the hiss of the tape or the shiny beauty of the CD.

ALICE WYLLIE meets four people committed to their particular format...

TEN years ago, if you were told that within a decade you could own a piece of equipment that could hold your entire music collection – tens of thousands of songs – on a gadget the size of a deck of playing cards, would you have believed it? Probably not. But today around 26 million people in the UK own an MP3 player, and CDs are threatening to go the way of vinyl and cassettes towards being virtually defunct.

This month marks the tenth anniversary of the MP3 player, a device that has revolutionised both the music industry and the way we listen to music. The first commercially-released personal music player capable of handling MP3 files was the MPMan F10, made by South Korea's Saehan Information Systems and launched in March 1998. The format then rapidly gained popularity, particularly following Apple's launch of the iPod in 2001.

To date, 141 million iPods have been sold worldwide, and it remains by far the world's most popular MP3 player, with the device's iconic white earbud headphones becoming a ubiquitous style statement/mugging invitation on street corners across the globe. Some MP3 players can now hold up to 40,000 songs and as technology improves, that number is rising rapidly.

We now almost take it for granted that we can carry our entire music collection with us wherever we go – but it wasn't so long ago that having music when on the move meant carefully selecting a CD or two to take with us in a portable CD player, or, to go further back, a lovingly-compiled mixtape for that much-loved portable cassette player.

Before all that, of course, there was vinyl – more cumbersome, but arguably never bettered as far as the listening experience goes – which remains in use today despite being threatened with extinction twice over, by cassettes and then CDs. However, these three formats are now being eclipsed by digital downloads.

Having been the only option available for decades, vinyl was finally surpassed in popularity by the CD in 1988, six years after the new format was introduced. The popularity of cassettes dropped rapidly by the turn of the century from 83 million UK sales in 1989, when they were at the height of their popularity, to just 500,000 in 2005.

The compact disc dominated the market for more than a decade, and hasn't bowed out just yet – while sales are declining in favour of digital music downloaded online (Apple's online music store, iTunes, has alone sold more than four billion songs since its launch in 2003), a massive 90 per cent of all albums are still sold as CDs.

Despite the convenience and accessibility of the MP3 player, there are casualties of the digital revolution, including the artwork once found on the sleeve of a record or a CD, as well as the adventure of tracking down a particularly rare piece of music.

Today's typical digital music collection seems less of an achievement than shelves buckling under the weight of vinyl or CDs, and requires less effort, knowledge and even less money to compile.

And then, of course, there's the music industry itself. Music can be downloaded online (illegally) for free, a practice that some say is hugely damaging to artists, particularly to less well-known musicians.

There's no denying that the MP3 player is now firmly our format of choice. But despite this, there are a number of music fans out there who are hanging on to older formats. Here we speak to four music fans about their favourite format, and why they won't be ditching it for that snazzy MP3 player just yet.

'Portable, hassle-free …and music plays perfectly every time'

Sandy Macdonald, 23, Glasgow, student and PR for Glasgow Art School

I OWN a Sony NW-E003 which has 1GB of memory, but I'm getting the urge to buy an 180GB iPod which can hold up to 40,000 songs for when I go travelling later in the year so I can put all my music from my laptop onto it.

I prefer MP3 players because of their portability and the storage they offer. Before MP3 players I had the hassle of having to carry about a carrycase for CDs and another for my portable CD player. My MP3 player is the size of a packet of chewing gum.

I love the fact that with MP3, the music plays perfectly every time. CDs get damaged and skip so easily, and it never matters how shockproof your portable CD player is, the CD always jumps.

Some people really enjoy looking at the artwork and analysing the sleeve of a CD or record, but I've never been that bothered. I much prefer being able to go online and download a new album in a few minutes, without the hassle of having to go to the shops or wait for an order to arrive.

Having such a big selection is a brilliant thing as it means you always have music for every occasion. I have different music while I'm walking to work or university, when I go running and when I go to parties where I can link it up to speakers.

On my laptop at the moment I have around 30GB of MP3 files and I can transport that with ease. To carry that amount of music on any earlier format, I'd have to take it in bin bags.

'Music matters more than the format'

ALAN MILLER, 39, is a DJ and events promoter from Glasgow

I WAS resistant to CDs for a long time and completely committed to vinyl, but eventually they began to appeal to me. On a purely practical level, they take up less space and they're easier to carry. They're also quite pretty in their own way. I think that CDs have a great aesthetic, and they're rather underrated in that sense. They have a modernity and romance of their own.

I usually DJ with vinyl and CDs, and sometimes just with CDs. When I started doing it, some people thought it was the future, and others thought I was a traitor and a charlatan! We've moved on to MP3 players now, but I'm not ready to let go of CDs just yet. When you have your entire music collection available to you, I find it really difficult to choose. I like taking my portable CD player with me and just taking one album. You savour the album that way, you listen to it more than once, rather than being suffocated by too much choice.

I also love that a CD is finite. Your MP3 player could play your whole music collection for days on end, and a record just keeps on playing, whereas a CD simply stops when it's finished. I think that in terms of choice and convenience CDs are something of a happy medium between vinyl and MP3, but at the same time, the music matters far more than the format.

'That crackle …it's an amazing sound'

Krista Blake, 38, runs Glasgow design shop and music venue Hitherto which is hosting the "Walleto" exhibition on 17 April as part of the Gi Festival.

I OWN lots of formats, from eight-tracks to MP3, but my favourite is vinyl. One of the most striking things about vinyl is that listening to it is an experience you really devote yourself to. You find yourself holding the sleeve and waiting by the record player to flip the record, so you get to know the names of the songs. One thing I noticed when CDs became popular was that you were familiar with the track number, not the name of the song. That seemed sad to me.

That crackle and pop when the needle drops onto the record – perhaps I'm nostalgic, but that's an amazing sound to me. A record is a beautiful size, and the artwork is important. It's one of the best parts of buying a new record, and you just don't get that with CDs or, obviously, with MP3s.

There's a real sense of achievement in feeling that you have a collection that you can hold and touch. My husband (Teenage Fanclub guitarist Norman Blake] tells our daughter that one day she'll own our collection, and there's something nice about feeling like you can pass it on.

Plus, now there's a sense of instant gratification with music. Obscure records were once an adventure to track down. You'd put them on and pore over the artwork. My copy of Nick Drake's Pink Moon has real sentimental value for me; it's quite rare and worth quite a lot of money now. That won't ever happen with an MP3.

'Ridiculous format, funny looks on the Tube – what's not to love?'

Steev Livingstone, 23, of Glasgow band Errors

I BEGAN buying music on cassettes, when I'd spend 49p on a single, so I guess that's one of the reasons that I don't want to stop using them. I still make mixtapes, and I listen to them on my Walkman. I do get funny looks when I take it out on the Tube. Most people think it's a ridiculous format, so perhaps that's why I remain so defiant about it.

I've got an iPod as well, which is very convenient, but cassettes have a certain charm. I love the fact that when you record over them, it's like a layering of history. I remember making an early demo tape for the band and recording it over an Eric Clapton cassette. At certain points in the tape, you could still hear traces of his voice coming through. Even now, we've used cassettes to record our new album, to get that hiss effect, that imperfection that I love.

For my degree show – I studied environmental art at Glasgow School of Art – I created an installation around cassette tapes. I used three cassette players, behind which was a wall of tapes. You could choose three tapes and play them together, creating a new song using a guitar solo from a Led Zeppelin song layered with a beat from a Blur track and a drum solo from another song, for example.

I liked that it was a very physical process, that you could pinpoint a certain point in a track on the tape, that you had to take the time to cut the tape yourself. I'd love for Errors to release cassette singles, but because the format is so rare now, it would be ridiculously expensive to do so.