Where do we go from here?

As the 250th anniversary of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart approaches the ways we listen to music has developed way past anything Mozart or even Thomas Edison could have imagined.  From small theaters and opera halls to tiny MP3 players, man has constantly changed the way music was delivered to the masses.  Until Edison figured out a way to record sound and play it back (Edouard-Leon Scott patented a device called the phonautograph on March 25, 1857 which could record sound but had no way to play it back) the only music people heard was during a live performance, music boxes, or player pianos.  Edison's phonograph could playback sound and he demonstrated this by playing a recoding of himself reciting "Mary Had a Little Lamb" (click the link to hear that first recording) on November 21, 1877.  Since then, there has been a frenzy of inventions which promised to improve quality and portability.

Radio broadcasts began in the 1920s and blossomed the following decade.  People could listen to news, music, and radio plays in the comfort of their own home.  Because of this, the world suddenly became a much smaller place.  People could hear things being said hundreds of miles from home.  When war broke out in Europe, Americans were able to experience what was happening through the intrepid work of people like Edward R. Murrow and his group of top notch war reporters.  The 1950s saw a boon in youth oriented programming and was the main reason Rock'n'Roll  took hold.  Radio became the selling point for records and records became a less expensive programming device.  It was a mutual admiration society - perhaps too much as we learned from the Payola scandals

When the Beatles invaded in the 1960s record sales were outpacing motion pictures in terms of profit.  Radios were getting smaller and smaller.  When stereo became the preferred method of listening to music, FM stations overtook AM and large consoles were popping up in living rooms across America.  You could play records, listen to FM, and in some cases watch television all from the same bulky device.  But there was still no easy way to take your own music with you.  Then came the 8-track players.  Cars in the early seventies were not complete without an 8-track and a little case that could hold up to a dozen of the cartridges.

Developers were still hard at work.  Cassettes started showing up and Sony who had made their name with small portable FM radios introduced the Walkman with a cassette player and now people could take their music with them while they shopped, jogged or traveled.  The '90s saw a boom in the compact disc players and discs and we thought we finally had a format we could stick with.  But no, computers were now a part of American life and developers figured out a way to digitize sound and it wasn't long before the i-Pod was born.  You could now put thousands of your favorite songs on a single device and basically take your entire music collection with you. Are these tiny devices the last word in music delivery systems?  Probably not.  But how we can advance past this escapes me.  Will we have little ear buds that can hold everything ever recorded?  Perhaps a pair of sunglasses that hold music and movies that can be broadcast in 3-D right before our eyes.  Who knows?  But as long as we have engineers and people who think outside the box, we will always have someone to come up with the next big thing.  I just want someone to alert me to it before it happens so I can invest!