Back in the days, we are all exposed to music in an extremely different way than we are currently. For one thing, you could turn on the radio and be exposed to new music enough where the average fan kept a blank tape in their radios for pause tape purposes to capture those new songs. For the same token, folks with VCR’s (and cable) used to keep a videotape in the VCR for when a new video for a song they liked dropped on either BET or MTV.

In addition, we had several music publications that were pretty much focused on informing readers about that new shit. This era was exciting because not only was the prospect of new Hip Hop exhilarating, but new music in general. Back in the early to mid 90’s mainstream was still pretty damn good.

Rock was still edgy and inventive, the States were just beginning to become receptive to genres such as Trip Hop, Jungle, Drum N’ Bass and 2 Step/Garage from the UK. Hip Hop was in it’s 2nd Golden Era as well. We craved exciting new music that captured our collective imaginations and we had a wealth of it at our disposal.

During this same time, the average music fan could walk into a thriving record store (a fair amount of them being independent, don’t forget) and talk to a knowledgeable staff about music and get recommendations. Back then, music heads could literally spend all day in different record stores conversing with employees and other regulars about music spanning different genres.

Thanks to cable music channels such as MTV, Much Music, BET & VH1 we were directly exposed to music we normally wouldn’t have heard. Why? Because the first thing we did in the morning when we woke up was turn on one of those stations as if they were the radio.

We might hear some Bjork, Tricky, Morcheeba, Portishead or Roni Size & Reprazent songs we liked. We could even hear some Fiona Apple, Silverchair, Cat Power, Garbage, Bush, Beck or Esthero songs that grabbed our attention while we had MTV on. In many cases we recorded the video because we liked that particular song but we didn’t want to take a chance and buy an album that we might not like. If there are no P2P sites in existence yet then how can we get free music to take a chance on any of it?

Back then we had music clubs such as Columbia House & BMG Music Club. They offered you ridiculous discounts to join such as 12 tapes or CD’s for 1¢ to begin then you had to buy a few albums at market price to fulfill your membership. This led to impulse purchases since they were essentially free and those impulse buys were usually music from genres you typically wouldn’t purchase.

This phenomenon explains why I saw so many Esthero, Air, Daft Punk, Moby, The Chemical Brothers,  Fatboy Slim, Smashing Pumpkins, Nine Inch Nails, Oasis, Sonic Youth, PJ Harvey, Hole, and Veruca Salt CD’s appear in many of my associates cars & apartments throughout the 90’s. Radio was still segregated (although it hadn’t yet began to suck) so it wasn’t music they normally heard about unless they were watching MTV regularly or reading NME, Spin or Rolling Stone.

MTV back then had a thriving news department and they were dead set on being a music channel. They had a variety of shows for different genres such as “Yo! MTV Raps”, “120 Minutes”, “Amp” and “The Indie Show” but it also played a mix of different genres in it’s rotation.

You could turn on MTV in the afternoon and see an Ol’ Dirty Bastard video followed by a Tool video followed by Nada Surf’s “Popular” followed by Fiona Apple’s “Criminal” which leads into a Mobb Deep’s “Back At You”. Those that remember this era have never recovered from the way everything ended up shaking out, either.

Everything slowly degenerated. The rise of the internet and faster connection speeds coupled with MTV changing it’s format dramatically so it’s new flagship show was the pop oriented Total Request Live was the first step. MTV then methodically erased all of it’s original genre based programming from the air and let go of it’s most knowledgeable VJ’s. Once MTV began focusing more on original programming thus began a mass exodus of music fans from MTV.

They created a sister station called M2 or MTV2 and claimed that it was specifically aimed at those who loved it’s old format beginning in the Summer of 1996. By the time M2 was widely available (circa 1999/2000), they’d changed their old format/aesthetic as well. It felt like the old switcheroo to many new subscribers who hounded their cable providers to carry it for years.

The quality of radio fell apart slowly following the signing of the Telecommunications Act Of 1996. The Hots & Powers of the radio world bought up all the privately owned radio stations and they all developed uniform playlists. The new “60 Add Rule” effectively removed local indie music from the regular radio rotation.

The introduction of P2P sites such as mp3.com, Napster, Kazaa & LimeWire in tandem with the wide availability of CD burners led to the death of the Columbia House and BMG music clubs. Fans were just downloading the music they wanted now & burning them to custom CD’s. Many blamed Apple Computer Inc. and it’s Macs for this phenomenon but a standalone CD burner (PC or Mac) was already easily affordable by 1998 at the earliest.

I worked at Ground Zero of the Napster Era, the Tower Records/Video @ 360 Newbury Street in Boston. The Northeastern campus wasn’t too far away and we’d noticed that a gang of Northeastern, Emerson and Boston University students would buy up CD-R’s like nobody’s business. Later on, we’d hear that Harvard & MIT students were doing the same at our Harvard Square location.

I found out about Napster from one of Shawn Fanning’s Northeastern friends. By that time our store was selling more CD-R’s than CD’s. This is back when the industry was making money hand over fist, mind you. Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, NSYNC, Backstreet Boys & the Spice Girls all had CD’s flying off the shelves. We were there for the beginning of the end of the box store and we didn’t even realize it at the time.

I remember reading Urb, NME, Mixmag, XLR8R, Spin and Rolling Stone in addition to publications like Ego Trip, On The Go, Fat Lace, Stress, Mass Appeal, Blaze and Hip Hop Connection religiously around that time. Most of these publications I loved reading and dreamed of one day writing for would eventually fold.

VHS tapes were quickly giving way to DVD’s which is a changeover that many undervalue. I remember how resistant some people were to that change. I pushed for us to changeover our VHS rental stock to DVD’s to keep up with the Blockbuster Video down the street.

Years later I’d also become an early adopter to this new video rental company with a revolutionary business model that I thought was brilliant due to the fact I managed a video store & worked with used DVD’s. That company was called Netflix, eventually it brought down Blockbuster Video. When the DVD changeover occurred between 1999-2000 they thought they were clear. Just like with the music box stores their arrogance had ultimately done them in.

The independent record stores were all that were left in the end. They went last. They were failing because serious music fans had gotten DSL, T1 lines or cable modems and retreated to the internet. The mom & pop stores got bought out by the dying chain stores just to have them go out of business themselves. I noticed this phenomenon happening all around me in Boston. I had a wide selection of record stores to frequent in the late 90’s and early 00’s but they became scarce not too long afterwards.

Apple Computer Inc. was the company that many blamed (unfairly, I might add) early on (circa 1998) for causing the first domino to fall that caused the eventual death of the music chain/box stores.

Eventually that same company would drop the “computer” from it’s name and create two things that those same people would claim were the nail in the coffin for these same record stores in late 2001. The iPod and the iTunes Store. The “Rip. Mix. Burn” slogan immediately came under fire even though folks had been doing that since the CD burner gained wide popularity circa 1998.

We began this trek back in the early 90’s. By 1996 things began to change slowly. By 1998, things began changing exponentially. By the end of 2001, many of us were dazed and confused trying to put together what the hell just happened. MTV and VH1 had switched to original programming in favor of music videos. MuchMusic was replaced by Fuse. If you actually wanted to see a video channel (such as VH1 Soul or MTV Jams) that played anything you cared to see you needed to shell out for digital cable.

Beginning in 2001, I was no longer paying exorbitant fees for DVD rentals as I was using this new rental service called Netflix instead. The video stores began to fail as well as the record stores. It was bad enough that near the end, record stores just stopped hiring knowledgeable staffs in favor of warm bodies but video stores began to do the same. Where did all of these music & film experts end up? Working office jobs and writing on the internet. Many of them were among that first wave of bloggers.

Every action has an equal or opposite reaction. Every time something is made or created a byproduct is created as well, often unintentionally. Where there is a void, something will come along and try to eventually fill it. All of those things we once had spoon fed & handed to us now have to be found and we do the grunt work ourselves using the internet for the most part.

Back when the internet was first widely introduced circa 1996, the slow connection speed and dial up kept it’s usage down naturally. Once that barrier was breached, it was a brave new world. I was getting my martial arts films straight from Hong Kong in regionless DVD’s for pennies on the dollar. I was bypassing copyright laws by copping VCD’s of out of print anime & cartoons from Malaysia for between $5-8 USD each. Most people had no clue what was going on. For us in the know it was a gift and a curse.

Yet another byproduct of this era are those that grew up during this time are nostalgic for it so they peruse sites like YouTube looking for things they remember seeing regularly during that time. Random segments from “Liquid Television” or “Sifl And Olly”. Videos they remember seeing on “120 Minutes” back in 1997. Old cartoons from Nickelodeon that aren’t available on DVD. Hollywood loves nostalgia. Just look at huge films like “American Graffiti” and “The Big Chill” for proof.

One day, Hollywood will begin making movies about things like arcades and record stores since neither really exist anymore. Things can never go backwards only forwards, the main problem is has all of the soul and love been sucked out of everything is favor of making a profit? Are things too far gone to infuse any of it back in?

It’s crazy to think that 10 years from now someone else maybe writing a similar piece about when we went from physical, tangible music, books & films to everything being digital and available in some form of digital cloud you can just pull things from whenever you desire them & the following byproducts of that changeover. I know I can’t wait to read it.

One.