Like many of us, my love for music began as young boy when I bought my first vinyl audio recording. Bob Dylan’s (1969) recording was one of my first.

 Record albums were pressed in “vinyl” in those days, a material which nearly went extinct when other formats came along; formats which were less expensive to manufacture, less expensive to distribute and perhaps most importantly to be considered –more convenient– for people to buy and use.

Them ol’ automobile manufacturers never figured out how to put a record turn table in a car so when we took our sweethearts to the drive-in we had to settle for eight track tape players.

I’ve heard it said Waylon Jennings gave Conway Twitty the nickname “Mr. Panty Dropper.” I’ve been playing guitar and trying to sing like Conway Twitty for decades but I’m telling you, back in the day they called boys like me hoods and we were way hipper than jocks because hoods knew the secret to hitting a home run with a girl was an Elvis tape.

The 8-track tape format had its day and tried to hold on for dear life. Capitalism and the ever present pursuit of the better mouse trap brought us the audio cassette tape format invented by Lou Ottens a Dutch audio engineer.

Not to be left behind the Japanese took the world by storm with the SONY Walkman becoming a huge success as the way to playback audio cassette tapes as we roamed far and wide taking our music with us. I actually still have a SONY Walkman and use it when occasionally taking walks to ponder my navel.

The audio cassette format was inexpensive to manufacture and distribute but the tape itself was prone to bind in the playback machines giving everybody one big pain in the ass. The march of progress had its way and the Compact Disk (CD) emerged.

 

The CD format kicked ass and remained viable for quite a long time. Easy to manufacture and reproduce every band in the world that had not yet made it into retail began selling their CDs at every venue they performed at. The bands wasted no time learning to market their own product selling it direct to the customer.

However, not unlike Little Miss Muffet who sat on her tuffet the pace of technological change moved rapidly and many were caught sitting on their tuffets as the spider came to sit down beside them.

The spider was “streaming” an “access anytime and anywhere” distribution format by means of the Internet, the World Wide Web and the “freemium” business model that not only disrupted CD it radically changed the quality of the audio. People traded audio quality for convenience. Listening to music on a cellphone is not unlike going back in time and listening to music as if one were listening to AM radio with little teeny earphones on.

No tangible format like tape or plastic disks were needed anymore thank you very much; just pay your monthly streaming bill and sit down at the trough to consume as much content as you can afford to pay for. 

Media brought to you by convenience and the exploitation hacking human behavior to always want something free has always been a successful  means of providing instant gratification.

Although viny recordings, CD and DVD formats remain in retail their sales have taken a big hit. After all, it is very difficult to compete with bits and bytes that are given away free as the means to lure customers to the buy button.

Even the streamers are vulnerable to better mouse traps. The mouse trap that can and to an extent is already disrupting streaming is Near Field Communication (NFC.)

All that stands in the way is time and the understanding by song writers and musicians that the use of NFC can and will disrupt the streamers and put the power and financial rewards of what is created back into the hands of the creators themselves.

No App. Just (((tap)))®