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September 5, 2024 • 13 mins

As Clairsy & Lisa wrap up The History Of Sound, today we were brought right into the 21st Century with The Digital Age of streaming, computers and downloads and they spoke to National Film and Sound Archive expert Jo McMahon. Did you have a Napster account?

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Speaker 1 (00:00):
This is a journey pop up the virule Plesy releases
the History of Sound.

Speaker 2 (00:07):
And what a journey it's been this history of sound
this week.

Speaker 3 (00:10):
Certainly has We've gone some really archaic stuff, going back
to those cylinders playing music and you know, all kinds
of audio.

Speaker 4 (00:17):
Love it in the early days came on a Milo Tenness.

Speaker 3 (00:21):
This is so bizarre really, but I've been doing a
bit of more com I know, quite bizarre. And then
we moved into things that were made of various things
including plastics and stuff, you know, cassettes and eight tracks,
and we talked about vinyl records. Today we're moving into
the current day and we're delving today into the digital
world of streaming and downloading and so much more. And
from the curator, one of the curators at the National

(00:43):
Film and Sound Archive of Australia to talk about it,
Joe McMahon.

Speaker 2 (00:46):
Joe welcome, Hi.

Speaker 4 (00:47):
Great to be here, Joe, Joe.

Speaker 1 (00:49):
So we've just talked about all the formats that we've
already gone through. When was the point where everything changed.

Speaker 5 (00:58):
Well, really the nineteen nineties was when the technology came
in that you could download music to your computer, you
could use your computer for storage. But at the time
in the nineties, CDs were absolutely booming, so they were
the most profitable medium for the recorded sound industry. So
the industry at the time wasn't very interested in going digital,

(01:19):
and most of the kind of digital music sharing around
the nineties was illegal. And then yeah, exactly, and then
the big game changer was iTunes. So the iPod and
iTunes came in in two thousand and one, and then
a couple of years later the iTunes store started, and

(01:40):
you know, you could buy a song for it was
nine nine cents in America and I think a dollar
sixty something here, which is a reasonably small amount. So
that really boomed legally paying for music in a download format,
and that kind of steeply grew like CDs had, but
then only lasted actually a couple of years. That music

(02:02):
download format has been the kind of reigning supreme over
the recorded industry.

Speaker 1 (02:08):
Don't think I'll ever forget watching Steve Jobs holding up
you know, those amazing launches that they used to do,
and holding up that tiny little little box and saying
you will have this mint, and I'm thinking, get out
of here, what are you no, I've seen my record
collections today we lost your mind.

Speaker 4 (02:26):
So what exactly was an MP three or is an
MP three?

Speaker 5 (02:33):
So MP three is a file type, an audio file type,
and it was released officially in the early nineties, so
around ninety two. And what it does is it compresses
music files so they're smaller in size, but you still
get the audio quality that's quite similar to the original source.
So it means that because they're compressed files there take

(02:55):
up a lot less room and you can store a
lot more because obviously your computer in the nineties and
early two thousands were storing a lot less than it
can today. So really compressing those files made music very
portable and transferable. You could file share MP three's, you
could rip them off CDs, you could burn them back

(03:17):
onto CDs and give to a friend, So it really
changed the game m P three's in terms of music sharing.

Speaker 1 (03:24):
Well, we thought music had become portable when we got
a discman with a cat play in it, and we
thought that was the coolest thing ever. So you can
imagine for those of us who lived through it to
find out that we can take our entire collection with
us when we leave the house. It's just so game changing.
It really is incredible.

Speaker 5 (03:45):
Yeah, job, yeah, And then oh yes.

Speaker 2 (03:49):
No, no, you keep going, keep going, it's good.

Speaker 3 (03:51):
Oh.

Speaker 5 (03:51):
I was just thinking today we have even more access
to a big collection through streaming, you know that exactually
millions of songs.

Speaker 4 (03:58):
But I'm sure we'll get there collection any words. Anything.

Speaker 3 (04:01):
This really did change the game for the music industry,
didn't it. But not always in a good way. Even now,
the artists are still up in arms about the tiny
percentage of royalties I get compared to their recorded music
in other ways in the old days. But you know,
when Napster and Limeline that came in, there was a
whole lot of people. It's pirating, wasn't it.

Speaker 4 (04:19):
Yeah, absolutely so.

Speaker 5 (04:20):
Napster came in in the late nineties, in nineteen ninety nine,
and that was a dramatic drop in CD sales. So
the music industry did not like that, and they actually
retaliated with quite a lot of lawsuits. And interestingly, it
wasn't just the industry that was doing legal battles, and
it was also bands and producers. I think Metallica and

(04:42):
Doctor Dre were amongst those suing over illegal downloads. Yeah,
and so those peer to peer kind of services where
you could file share were hotly contested by the music industry,
but it didn't stop them from coming about. You had
naps and then also LimeWire and pirate Bay, and so

(05:03):
there was really a decade of those services being really
widely used, and actually a lot of the legal battles
kind of gave a bit more publicity ironically to those services.
I think Napster got a lot more members after the
legal battles because people found out about it.

Speaker 4 (05:21):
That's not true, Joe.

Speaker 1 (05:23):
Another way digital changed everything is the way that the
music even gets to us from the musicians. For a
lot of them, they're able to just cut out the
middle guy, and all of a sudden, musos are recording,
especially young ones, are recording things in their bedroom and
then distributing it.

Speaker 4 (05:43):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (05:43):
Absolutely, and I think that's been one of the most
interesting and fantastic changes over the last twenty years or so.
And that came about through both the distribution methods, but
also we're able to access a lot of the recording
technology that would have been you know, gate kept by
big productions, studios or previously. You can download ableton or

(06:05):
a similar software to a laptop and create something at home,
and so we're kind of and then also obviously move that,
you know, distribute your own files through something like Spotify,
so you're moving from going straight from artists to audience,
which has been a total change in how things are done.
And I think social media actually was an extremely important

(06:28):
forerunner for that. I think about how for years, MySpace
was the place where you discovered music, and that was
musicians uploading their their content to MySpace and people discovering.
So it's definitely kind of cutting out the middleman, which
has been a really interesting development.

Speaker 3 (06:46):
Something that happened ten years ago wouldn't never have happened before,
and that is you Two's Songs of Innocence all of
a sudden landing in your i Tunes in twenty fourteen.

Speaker 2 (06:54):
And people were really pissed.

Speaker 3 (06:56):
If I weren't happy didn't ask for this because ninety sixty,
the biggest band in the world, the Rolling Stones of
the Beatles, didn't come to your house and put an
album in your collection. They just, without asking You two,
just dropped them into your iTunes. People weren't happy, were they?

Speaker 5 (07:09):
I completely forgot about that? Yeah, but don't big people
liked being told what to listen to or you actually
had read a lot of distrol over your library then too,
you've changed the pictures and the song yet rather and things,
so having someone enforced the way it looked was probably
not very good.

Speaker 4 (07:26):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (07:27):
I think also another thing that we should mention that
the digital developments have given us is, in addition to
our music and everything, is the rise of the podcast.

Speaker 4 (07:40):
We wouldn't have all these podcasts if.

Speaker 1 (07:42):
It wasn't for the way we get our audio and
everything now.

Speaker 5 (07:48):
Yeah, absolutely, And they've diversified what we listened to completely.
Podcasts were they came about out of audio blogging, internet radio,
you know, MP three file development and that same time
the late nineties and early two thousands, and in two
thousand and four we actually got the term podcast and

(08:09):
by two thousand and five iTunes were supporting it as
a format and that become absolutely massive. Today the majority
of Australians listen to podcasts and they're a huge medium
that give us a whole wide range of voices that
we might not have necessarily heard in traditional media.

Speaker 3 (08:29):
Yeah, you've also got the other digital world allows you
to do really cool stuff like I'm in a shop
the other day at the caron Oup shops, and are
he the start of a song and I know this song.
I know this song, but I just excuse me, I
just hit shazam and it tells me I wis shazaming
to work out people. Still it was big Jet playing
by Magus and Julia Steiner, and of course it was
you know, but it just makes you lazy. But it's
very cool that that identifies the song just like that.

Speaker 5 (08:52):
And if you said, absolutely, that's totally changed the way
we find music as well, so you do identifying music
and find music through like algorithms and different ways of searching.
You know, it's yeah, completely changed the game. And as
I said before, social media as well, you know, songs

(09:12):
getting big off social media or coming back into playlists
and very very different from the days of just the
top one hundred chart.

Speaker 1 (09:21):
Yes, yeah, the only thing I feel that some people
miss out on and I do mean a lot of
younger people might buy songs or stream songs or whatever,
and they're not getting albums anymore. And you know, don't
still get albums because quite often the best tracks that
you're going to get from that person is you know,

(09:41):
on the album and not the song that you heard
on the radio.

Speaker 4 (09:44):
And then started streaming and everything. So yeah, never turn
you back on the album.

Speaker 5 (09:48):
Yeah yeah, I think the because albums, you know, coming
in with vinyls, there was the city of the album
for a lifelis saving it.

Speaker 4 (09:57):
Yeah yeah.

Speaker 5 (09:58):
And then I think about like, you know, buying a
single song off iTunes and that coming back in of
the song being the like the viable thing is the
song rather than the album where you find album on
CD and vinyl and now we buy a song or
listen to a certain song, But pre vinyl, you know,
when you could only keep on recorded sound a couple

(10:22):
of minutes worth of audio, the song was supreme and
pre recorded sound. The music itself like sheet music, and
the song itself was also ray and supreme. So it
does seem to ebb and flow a.

Speaker 1 (10:34):
Little albums, It does a little circle of things.

Speaker 4 (10:40):
Yes, all that's good.

Speaker 3 (10:42):
The digital world means we miss out on that romantic
thing if you're not going and buying vinyl or CDs
or whatever it might be.

Speaker 2 (10:46):
And you know, the record store experience of the el days.
But that's just the way it is.

Speaker 5 (10:52):
And I think that's why we've seeing the resurgence in vinyl.

Speaker 1 (10:54):
Absolutely want that exacperience and that whole tangible thing. There
seems to be too main camps these days when it
comes to music streaming services Spotify or Apple Music. Is
there a reason to be in one or the other?
Are they just is it just a matter of you know,
which one you ended up going with? Is one better
than the other for any reason?

Speaker 5 (11:14):
Or I think it's a matter of which one someone
will share a family account with you.

Speaker 1 (11:29):
All Right, Well, we've come to the end of our
history of sound. I'm sure that there's going to this
will be ever evolving. Joel will be all over it
because she is a curator of the National Film and
Sound Archive of Australia. And your website is n f
s A, isn't it dot com? And there's lots and

(11:51):
lots to learn there. It's really interesting stuff. Joe, thank
you so much for joining us this morning.

Speaker 3 (11:57):
No Race, it's been great your expertise and all of
the people who've helped us this week from National Film
and Sound Archive.

Speaker 1 (12:04):
Something that you couldn't have done twenty years ago. You'll
be able to hear this whole thing on our podcasts.

Speaker 2 (12:08):
You will.

Speaker 4 (12:11):
Digitalization.

Speaker 2 (12:12):
I think we've swum away to the end of the stream.

Speaker 4 (12:14):
Tell you something really embarrassing.

Speaker 2 (12:17):
Are you ready? I'm always up for you to embarrass.

Speaker 4 (12:19):
This I had.

Speaker 1 (12:22):
I was paying for Apple streaming for a while before
I even realized that ben I could get any song
I wanted at any time.

Speaker 4 (12:34):
For it on my iTunes I have.

Speaker 1 (12:37):
I went through a big thing of burning all of
my CDs onto my midunes out and storing it in
there and so I could take it in my pocket
because that was the best.

Speaker 4 (12:46):
Thing that I thought it ever happened.

Speaker 2 (12:47):
Gotcha.

Speaker 1 (12:48):
And then I didn't realize that I was because I
have Apple on the TV, so I didn't realize I
was actually paying for an Apple you know, subscription without
realizing that that meant that I could go on there
and just ask for any song I wanted at any time.

Speaker 4 (13:01):
I was still just playing everything from my own.

Speaker 2 (13:04):
Collection that was recorded in there.

Speaker 4 (13:06):
That is called being old.

Speaker 2 (13:08):
That's hilarious too.

Speaker 1 (13:10):
But now I'm hip to the whole scene and I'm
streaming like a streaming things.

Speaker 2 (13:15):
You just said hip and then you click.

Speaker 4 (13:18):
Alve downy.

Speaker 2 (13:19):
Thanks for confessing though. That was That was good. That
was big of you.

Speaker 1 (13:22):
Thank you to the National Film Sound in Australia for
all their help. This week has been absolutely illuminated.

Speaker 3 (13:29):
The group said, I said I was

Speaker 4 (13:32):
Hip to the whole scene, and then I went he
did it sounded quite good
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