I took my younger brother to his first concert to see Genesis at Winterland*. My mother was concerned about the demeanor of the fans in the crowd. I told her not to worry because Genesis fans were very mellow. Minutes after the show started the people sitting behind us popped open a bottle of champagne and it sprayed all over, soaking my brother’s back. Welcome to Winterland! 
*You can listen to most of the show on youtube…here is Squonk
Cassette technology was nowhere near this level in 1971. That’s why I got a reel-to-reel tape recorder. And I wasn’t the only one. WBCN had rare tape nights, where they played obscure bootlegs and B-sides and live versions, and the Boston record stores had sales on tape for it.
It was the kind of stuff you find on bonus CD tracks today, and things like the “Judas” version of “Like a Rolling Stone.”
in the 90s i had a 3.5mm attachment that was both an amplifier and also split the headphone jack into 4 ports. that was fun.
So you played rock music?
Some of you mentioned listening to music before the era of cassettes. Ha! I was listening to music before the era of what came to be known as “stereos”, because stereophonic sound wasn’t a thing yet.
When I was very little I played records on what would have been called a “record player”, a thing about the size of a small suitcase with built-in speakers and a lid that opened to reveal a turntable. But when my (much) older brother left home, he bequeathed to me his “hi-fi” that he had built himself, consisting of a home-built cabinet with a high quality turntable, a built-in tube-type amplifier, and a separate speaker in its own cabinet about as large as the first one. And I’ve been an audio nut ever since!
In my later years when I put together a pretty good component system of my own, it included a reel-to-reel tape deck. This made it trivially easy to copy music when my friends brought over albums, but I was also in the habit of taping my own records when they were still brand new, to preserve the sound quality against vinyl wear and crackles and pops. Believe it or not, in those days you could actually buy pre-recorded reel tapes instead of vinyl records, although those were rare.
Anyway, my friends and I “shared” music just by listening to it at each others’ houses, and with my tape deck I was in a unique position to copy any albums I liked that they brought over. Later, in the era of cassette decks, most of them had one and the album copying went both ways. I eventually got a cassette deck of my own, but mainly just used it for creating music for the car. The reel-to-reel deck was significantly higher quality, although as I vaguely recall there were specially formulated high-end cassette tapes that would come close if recorded on a deck that was designed for them.
By the time CDs came along I was married and had other priorities, though I was still an audio nut and I remember being delighted when one of my wife’s Christmas presents to me was a CD player for my audio system.
Stereophonic sound as in a couple of speakers was “a thing” unless you are, like, 100+ years old 
, but stereo LPs seem to not really have been sold until the late 1950s, for some reason.
I guess not truly sharing but in the mid 60s, particularly with the Beatles new releases, Sydney (NSW) DJs at midnight would play all of side A, turn it over and play side B, then repeat the process. No talk, no ads then staying up to discuss it with friends. Anyone else have this experience?
I shared an apartment with two other guys in the mid-70s. We got paid on Friday and one of the next stops for us – individually or together – was Tower Records (or The Wherehouse or Underground Records) to score a new album (or two…or three).
So Friday and Saturday nights we’d invite friends over and gather in the living room for a listening session (aka “party”). Our tastes spanned the spectrum of 60s-70s rock from America to Frank Zappa, so there was a lot of musical cross-pollination happening. One of my roommates would play the same albums over and over again ad nauseam which is how I developed a dislike for the Eagles (Imagine my delight years later when I saw The Big Lebowski )
Trading cassettes was indeed done in the 1971-1972 period. Advent, Norelco, and Sony all had halfway decent home cassette decks and cassette tapes themselves were pretty cheap. While they weren’t up to later standards, you’ve got to keep in mind that many people were listening to pre-recorded 8-tracks in their cars and even at home. (I actually traded mono cassettes that had been made on a portable Norelco cassette recorder using a mic in front of a Heathkit speaker.) Plus, many of us were listening to the singles on crummy little AM transistor radios. Decent cassettes weren’t that much different.
The first good tape deck I had was a Teac A-450, which was in early 1973.
Yeah, my mom had an AM radio in the kitchen and “shared” all of the very first Beatles songs with our family. 
Much better than my dad who played Hank Williams Sr, Johnny Cash and Loretta Lynn over and over again. 
Thanks mom!
It took years until I truly appreciated my dad’s music and country music in general.
That’s not my memory. Blank cassettes cost almost half as much as a cassette album. I remember recording over “crap” albums (my parent’s) by stuffing a small wad of chewed paper in the little hole.
Early 60’s teenager. 45’s, LP’s, and shared listening on new-fangled transistor radios.
Bulk cassettes in transparent cases that were “welded” together and not screwed were quite inexpensive. We used them for bulk recording in the university language lab. You could buy them for less than $0.50 all over. It was a couple years before the “Chrome Wars” started and quality tapes were $2.50+ each.
I mostly bought TDK SA90s, but when money was tight my low-budget option was DAK. Anyone remember the catalog from the mid-80s?
I think I remember seeing albums on reel-to-reel tape, but they were expensive, so I never came close to buying one.
I have three different comedy bits from the late 50’s about “hifi” - Spike Jones, Flanders and Swann, and Lenny Bruce. The Bruce one involved a guy hooked on hifi components like one would be hooked on drugs.
My parents had a non-hifi record player console in the living room, with a set of 78s, including Caruso, “Laura” by Spike Jones and a bunch of Sam Levenson and other Jewish comedy records, all of which can be found on YouTube today.
I certainly remember reel-to-reel being one of the format options which Columbia House offered for albums in the late '70s and early '80s (along with vinyl, cassette, and 8-track), though the impression which I had, as a teenager, was that reel-to-reel was the province of serious audiophiles with money.