I only have vague memories of my music consumption in the earliest years of my life (under 10). I know I somehow acquired Steve Martin's album
A Wild And Crazy Guy (1978), but when I started repeating some of the lines, my mother took it away ("Where'd you get this??"). I posted somewhere on here that I had a couple K-Tel records:
Pure Power (1977) and
Starburst (1978). That's how songs like "Play That Funky Music", "Hard Luck Woman", "I Never Cry", "Dream Weaver", "Lowdown", "Hot Child In The City", "Every Kinda People", "It's A Heartache", "Smoke From A Distant Fire", "Two Out Of Three Ain't Bad" and "Baby Hold On" got etched into my soul.
Starting around age 11, I bought some 45s with my own money from my paper route like "No Can Do", "You Make My Dreams" but most of my music was taped off of friend's LPs or off the radio - with the first few seconds missing and the DJs talk at the start and end often included. My first LP was
Night In The Ruts by Aerosmith because nobody I knew owned it.
From around 1982-1986, I bought albums and copied them to cassette, knowing a cassette player would eventually eat every one of them. So the album was my master copy, probably only ever played a few times each.
From 1987-early 90s, I bought cassettes.
In 1990, I had a room mate that loved cassingles. I only ever bought maybe a dozen or so, but he had 100+. I got into a lot of artists because we'd take turns throwing cassingles into his tape player.
That same year, I bought my first CD. It was a CD-5 with extra songs you couldn't get on the album (Red Hot Chili Peppers
Unbridled Funk N Roll 4 Your Soul - basically the "Taste The Pain" single). I knew CDs was the way to go (I hate cassettes) but I didn't have a CD player. i started building a CD collection and my room mate's girlfriend put them on cassette for me.
In the mid90s into the 00s, I would go to Boston and dig through dusty dirty CD bins for deals (we already talked about this elsewhere). I bought hundreds of albums for $2-$6, usually promo CDs that radio stations didn't want and sold to the used CD stores.
In 1999, it was Napster then Scour Exchange. I also started burning CDs. The idea of burning 15 songs to a CD, like my old radio mixtapes, was huge in my world. I could get rid of the 1-track and 2-track promo CDs, putting 10 CDs onto one CD-R. I could also get rid of those albums that only had 1 or 2 good songs, just rip the good ones then toss the disc.
Around 2001-ish, my MP3 collection became king. I still have those original MP3s on my current computer 20+ years later and everything I've added since. I have over 30K MP3s, all with 128kbps bitrate, ID3 tagged and volume normalized. Here is one of the albums I've had in my collection since 2003:
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