For myself it started with the latest releases on 45 and then later progressed to the latest album release. I can still fondly recall playing Queens News of the World with my cousins and rockin’ out to We Will Rock You. The volume we played it at pissed my dad off, which it should. Then we started singing along!
Also recall waiting at the bus stop with my AM transistor radio and sharing a new song on the radio with the single earphone. There were classic songs being released every other day!
Please share some experiances, no matter if the media or method was the same.
I was a kid in the 80s and 90s. We’d share new music by trading cassettes and CDs. I remember in the early 90s, we’d listen to cassettes on a walkman while riding on the school bus.
Then when we got to the 2000s, we’d swap hard drives. Someone would rip their entire library onto an external HDD, then’ we’d all take turns putting our entire library on the drive and sharing it with each other, everyone downloading the entire drive onto their home computers so we all ended up with each other’s entire library.
for me it was cassettes…we would copy stuff from one another. I remember my first exposure to metal—-a red labelled tape with ‘So Far So Good So What’ on one side and Anthrax’s ‘I’m the man’ on the other. Never really cared much about music til a friend gave me that.
Late 80’s/Early 90’s, we’d copy the cassette tape. A little after than, we’d burn a CD. Then, at the very end of the 90’s, we had Napster. I downloaded a ton of songs, maybe close to a thousand. Then, for anyone that wanted a copy of all my songs, I’d pull the hard drive out of their computer, put it in mine and copy them over. It was fast enough that I didn’t let them pick and choose the songs, I’d just copy all of them over and they could delete whatever they didn’t want.
Yeah, my teenage years (1985-1991) were squarely in the cassette tape era. I mean, CDs came out late in that era, but home CD burners weren’t a thing until I was out of college by a year or two.
So we tended to tape songs from the radio, dub commercial tapes, and dub CDs to tape, and then splice them all together into mix tapes. That is, if we weren’t just copying the entire album outright.
At one point in college (not a teenager), I had a whiz-bang dual tape deck that interfaced with my CD player that had a mode where you could synchronize the two- you’d hit Record, and it would record the first side of the tape from the CD, and when it had copied all the tracks for the first side, it would prompt you to flip the tape and press some button or other, and it would pick up where it left off for the second side. Plus it did Dolby B, C and HX Pro, and handled Type I, II, and IV cassette tapes. A Type IV tape with Dolby C and HX Pro was surprisingly high quality when recorded from CD and played back on a deck that could handle it.
We didn’t really - cassettes were not really popular yet ( I was in high school from 1977-1981) and we all listened to the same radio stations so we all heard the songs at around the same time. We did have 45s and albums - but nobody would have bought them if they hadn’t already heard the song(s)
This reminded me of the first true audiophile I meet my second year in college (1981). He would buy half speed masters of LP albums by Pink Floyd, the Beatles, the Doors and the like then only play them once (on a linear tracking turntale) while recording them to his Reel to Reel deck. He also had access to some very high end audio enhancing goodies for the head.
When I was in high school, (I graduated in 1969,) we didn’t share, just sometimes play music when we visited with each other.
When I went to college I bought a reel-to-reel tape recorder, and eventually a full stereo system. I borrowed records from others in the dorm and taped them. And also sometimes taped stuff from the radio.
Yes, this was the OG way of sharing music ! I recall staying the weekend with a friend when I was like 11 and his teenage sister put Grand Funk Railroad on the record player, I was blown away.
The volume we played it at pissed my dad off, which it should. Then we started singing along!