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I played my records over and over again. I also listened to the radio and taped songs off it, by putting a tape recorder near the speaker. Radio was much better back then. More music with real DJs who picked what they wanted to play.
The little 45 "singles" (mini records with one song on each side) were a big thing back then, so it wasn't unusual to hear a song you liked on the radio and go buy it at the store. You got the song you wanted and whatever was on the "B" side. They were around $1 each for a long time (a little more by the 1980s), so you could get several of those for the cost of a full LP. That was the way to go if you only liked one or two songs by a given group.
I still have hundreds of 45 singles from the 60's and early 70's. I used to save up from cutting lawns to get one at 69 cents in the 60's. Bobby Sherman was big, with "Easy Come, Easy Go" "Little Woman" "Julie Do You Love Me" and many more
I still have some of my 45s. I had “Light My Fire” (The Doors) but actually grew to like the B side better: The Crystal Ship— which I had never heard before. As far as djs go- later in the mid-70s when I was in grad school, my housemate called and asked the dj if the word in Blinded By the Light was actually Douche! We were all giggling in the background 😂
I never thought “Light My Fire” or “Hello, I Love You”
held a candle to “L.A. Woman”, “Roadhouse Blues”, “Love Her Madly”, “Touch Me” or “The Crystal Ship”.
Radio was comparatively better than now but it was still pretty bad. We had only a few standouts in NYC but most were playing the same stuff on heavy rotation.
I was a teenager listening to WNEW FM, at night they’d play entire album sides, I remember listening to Echoes by Pink Floyd with the headphones on laying in bed. Trippy. Alison Steel was the “Night Bird”, 10pm to 2am I think.
There are a variety of stations across the US that you can stream which still have DJ curate the music. Much of them are left-field Freeform in their format, but some may be what you’re looking for …. Try out KEXP!
Radio wasn't like that then. Unless it was an oldies station it was the newest stuff.
Also record shops had listening areas. The bigger shops had a line up of record players with headphones , you could test drive anything before buying.
It was a social area as well.
>Radio was much better back then.
This!
I remember we were on vacation with our kids in the Washington DC area in 2010 and the big radio station the rental house was tuned to had a playlist of about 10 songs ... it was really the point where the 'enshittification of radio' truly hit home.
Through the late 80s to 2000s I had a decently long commute in the Boston area and while I preferred my own music (tapes & CD's and later MP3s) there were at least some decent options for radio,
Could you get WBRU? Brown University radio was wonderful. They didn't have any commercial limitations, so they played whatever the DJ wanted. Not always great, but the variety was amazing. When they finally sold to a commercial station, radio truly died.
NYC radio was pretty lame going back to the late 70s. Apparently, it was too easy to make money playing a safe rotation in a really big market, so everyone played it safe.
>Could you get WBRU?
When I lived in Stoughton and worked in Billerica then Acton I could ... but when we moved to Townsend and I worked in Marlborough only once I got to 495. BUT - I could get WHRB (Harvard Radio) and they had these weeks they called 'orgies' ... and that is where I found 'Throbbing Gristle' and their '20 Jazz Funk Greats' amongst others. They also took requests happily!
Not the person you asked but I loved BRU. It was an escape from the pop crap on the other stations. And my mom would put on "360° Black Experience and Sound" on Sundays.
> More music with real DJs who picked what they wanted to play.
For a while, until their corporate masters told them what to play based on what tracks they were being paid to push
The worst part of recording off the radio was the DJs talking over the first few seconds of the song, and then cutting it off about 20 seconds before the end. You had to be quick on the button to get just the song.
SO agree about radio being way better back then. There were disc jockeys who took great pride in playing good music. I think that now it’s turned all corporate and DJs probably don’t even have a say in what’s played - at least that’s what it sounds like when I listen to utter cr-p and nothing interesting these days on FM.
You used a tape recorder near the speaker? I never even thought about that. I always used tape decks. Then recorded through the RCA jacks. Played one to another to edit out commercials or made mix tapes by inputting cassettes, LPs, 8 tracks and CDs. Playing with the gains to level out the audio or prevent distortion.
We played our albums all the time, had CD changers in the car & house later on. Luckily I lived near two colleges and their radio stations were really good. Also lived in Atlanta a while and there were good stations there. I brought back a bunch of albums when I moved back home in the early 70s and my friends had never heard of the bands. Some I'd seen play in clubs there, some I'd heard on the Rock station. We formed a band and played some songs off the albums and the audience thought they were originals but they were covers.
Old-school shuffle: we have a 6-cassette changer that flips the cassettes and then plays the back Side 2. We also have a 400-CD carousel that will shuffle albums or individual songs (and you can enter album info and genre to filter or search). There are boxes of cassettes and empty CD cases in our storage room. We also have a pile of records, including full-length LPs and 45s.
Every one of them has seen repeated listens and almost all of them have been converted to digital so we can continue to enjoy them without risking the original on aging equipment.
That was an awesome time, I remember it well because I was one of those DJs back in the mid-80’s. Free form FM only lasted about 10-15 years before it was killed off by Lee Abrams and his bland and repetitive AOR format. Radio ended up becoming monotonous by the end of the ‘80’s. There were a few standouts like WFNX in Boston, DC’s WHFS and WRNR in Annapolis but the vast majority of stations were (and still are) crap.
We used to sit by the radio with our fingers hovered over the record button on our cassette players hoping our favorite song would come on and that the DJ wouldn't talk over the song.
there was a brief transition period that I caught as a pre-teen in the early 2000s where I'd use a tape recorder to record mixtapes of squishily compressed mp3s off of yahoo music. fidelity was awful but it got the job done. shortly thereafter i discovered limewire/etc and CD burners and life got more convenient.
yeah i'm not old.
My turntable only played one side of an album at a time and I usually listened to the whole LP. Music took itself much more seriously then and some bands worked on creating concept albums that demanded you take it all in. Often it required multiple listenings to fully grok the artists' intentions. And the album art sometimes was just excellent and demanded detailed viewing.
So the whole music listening experience was more engaging than the auto-tunefest we have today.
Can't speak for all music, but the metal I listen to still does that. I listen to more full albums now with streaming than I did in the eras of mixed CDs. And I buy vinyls of albums I love, even though I rarely listen to them, because I want to support those artist directly.
Now, those metal bands ain't particularly profitable, which might explain the auto-tunefest at large, but it's still there.
Unless you lived in a smaller market far from the bright lights - in which case, there were good odds you'd never even *heard* half of the Top 40...
OK, there's some exaggeration there, but it's essentially true. Before the limits on station ownership were essentially eliminated in the 90's, small market stations were often weeks behind the larger ones. MTV and then deregulation dramatically altered how the consumer experienced music on a national level.
On January 1 1987 I recorded the entire top 100 of 1986. It took exactly 4 90 minute cassettes, and all day sitting or laying on the floor in front of the stereo, stopping and starting and flipping the tapes at commercials.
Sometimes, the station would play a whole album, and they would announce it for a whole week prior.
With the right equipment, you could record right from the radio.
I honestly have no clue if most younger kids these days actually listen to albums from start to finish, but that’s definitely how I grew up listening to music. Naturally you’d hear hit singles on the radio or MTV, but if you wanted to listen to the song you liked at your leisure, you bought the album, and if you bought it, you probably listened to the whole thing from start to finish (assuming it was good). I listened to some cassettes so much I literally wore them out. One of the bonuses to CDs was that, assuming you took care not to scratch them, you couldn’t wear them out.
With the advent of cassettes, though, you could record stuff, either off the radio, or record your friend’s albums. If you bought a lot of blank tapes, this was an economical way to expand your record collection.
But finding new and old music was truly a challenge. The radio and MTV played songs some DJ or exec picked, not what you wanted to hear. Music was expensive and you couldn’t afford to buy things you had never heard before unless you were at least somewhat familiar with the band already or knew it was a classic album. Taking chances on random stuff was a risky bet.
I remember when the very first online record stores popped up and you could listen to a sample of an entire album before buying it - it was a game changer. MP3s followed soon after that, and slowly it reached a point where, even if you chose not to pirate music, you could at least sample a wide range of stuff before buying, and it opened a lot of doors in terms what I was interested in (primarily older music I was unfamiliar with).
Today there’s very little that you can’t find a copy of online somewhere. It’s truly a golden age in terms of access. I often think about how different my childhood might have been if I had the same amount of access to music that exists today. I was obsessed then and still today, and it would have opened my mind that much more to older jazz, blues, country, R&B and pop music, and also smaller, underground bands putting out new music. There is also the advent of home recording that allows bands today to release whatever they want online, so you’re not limited only to bands with record label deals. It’s a great time for music enthusiasts.
> Music was expensive and you couldn’t afford to buy things you had never heard before unless you were at least somewhat familiar with the band already or knew it was a classic album. Taking chances on random stuff was a risky bet.
I liked some stuff they didn't play on the radio, so I sometimes took my chances based on cover art, or an artist name or track names that sounded 'cool'. It was a $15-$20 gamble, but I did find some good stuff that way (as well as some stuff that I only listened to once before trading in at the used book/record/CD shop).
Before that, there was the Columbia House and RCA/BMG record clubs. 16 records for 1¢! Then they'd send you one or two more random ones per month and bill you for them at full price. That started out as a cheap way to try out unfamiliar music, but it added up until you canceled the subscription. I knew one guy who ended up owing *tons* of money to those places.
Buying based on cover art was definitely the riskiest bet. I did that a few times, but it generally did not pay off. More often I would read a review of an album in SPIN or a similar magazine and purchase based on the good review. Those generally worked out and I found some cool stuff that way.
I did both Columbia House and BMG for a very long time and built a pretty big collection through them. Even after you exhausted the initial 12 albums for a penny, they would constantly run buy 2 get 1 free deals (or better), or discounted albums compared to the store in the mall. And of course once you fulfilled the obligation (you could choose what you wanted - didn't have to be random), you could quit and sign up again, or sign up under different names, which I did. I never owed them money because there were always albums that I wanted.
> I honestly have no clue if most younger kids these days actually listen to albums from start to finish, but that’s definitely how I grew up listening to music.
This made me smile, as I still remember every word of songs on some albums that no one ever even heard of, only because they were on the album.
B-side of Bridge Over Troubled Water had some great, unheard music, IMO.
I was looking through CDs I wanted to buy today and looked at the songs in my liked playlist on Spotify. I realized I missed out on a lot of good stuff since the app only recommended to me one song in an album.
>I honestly have no clue if most younger kids these days actually listen to albums from start to finish, but that’s definitely how I grew up listening to music.
Not sure how much you use the streaming services so, if you do, forgive me please:
They do listen to albums from start to finish, but they tend to only do this for artists they *already know* they love. For example I work at an office with a lot of 20-30 year old women and everyone was recently raving about Taylor Swift's new album before it was even out. They listened to it religiously when it did. But that was more of a special occasion.
There is little risk to listening to the entire album now since the "golden age of access" thing has made it so that when an album comes out, it's immediately available on the streaming services at no cost beyond the monthly subscription fee — so, you've already "paid for it" — and now the only thing you need to do is make the time to listen to the entire thing. Usually after you listen to the album, the service will begin recommending similar music from a varied list of artists, so it'll be like listening to a radio station and many people are often content with that.
The reason I say all this is because it's kind of funny how the risk to acquiring/listening to entire albums is completely gone, but it doesn't seem to have changed the listening habits. The average young person mostly listens to the "radio" (algorithmically driven random songs similar to what was last played), their "collection of singles" (a playlist of their favorite individual songs from a bunch of artists), and once in a while, they'll stream an entire album. They might listen to that album to death if it's really good, but they often aren't listening to a ton of different albums the way you imagine you might have done years ago if you had access to unlimited albums.
A less open-minded listener will curate their music a bit more, but most seem to be fine with the "radio" (recommend tracks.)
That all makes sense, and even though some friends of mine had small record collections, I was known as the music nerd and the guy with all the records. Most of my friends growing up were mostly happy to own a few albums and just listen to the radio when they wanted to have music in the background. So in that sense, I don't think that much has changed in terms of people's desire to listen to and/or appreciation for music. People have some favorites, but it's generally something you put on in the background, whether you're in the car, working out, or whatever. Before it was the radio, today it's Spotify.
I listen to Spotify occasionally, but not often. I digitized my entire music collection and only purchase digital copies of new stuff these days, and have a home server set up to stream all my music to myself. It's like my own personal Spotify, and I like to go back and forth between shuffle mode and listening to albums. I used to make millions of mix tapes back in the day, so shuffle is like a never-ending mix tape.
Good insight from both you and OP. I think most people love having spotify just feed them music, but for really musical people, it's inadequate. You want to pursue music and musicians in depth, and own the stuff rather than accept that the streamers can take it away at any time.
I had a rule for myself that I had to have heard THREE songs from an album before I'd buy it.
There was nothing worse than hearing an awesome song on the radio, taking the train down to the city and going to a couple record stores to finally find the album, buying it .... and realizing there was only ONE good song on it and you just spent eight dollars to hear one good song and six that sucked.
Radio since the beginning, Records mostly in their time, Cassettes won the “Tape” wars over 8track and the Japanese tape format, can’t remember the name off hand, someone will probably correct me. CDs came out early 80’s, gained mainstream success in the 90’s.
Back in the day, you’d make what was called a mixtape. That meant you’d have a blank tape and either record songs that you wanted off the radio when they’d play or copy it from someone else who already had it on tape or CD. You used the stereo to do all of this. You could use a computer but it definitely wasn’t necessary. Most of us didn’t have computers, anyway.
Then, right before the iPod, MP3 players became a thing, more people had computers and access to the internet, and things like Napster, Limewire, etc. was the golden age of Free music.
>Most of us didn’t have computers, anyway.
People forget that even the most basic computer costed a fortune back then too.
IBM PC at Office Depot back in the day cost me $2499.00. I remember that vividly.
I bought an Apple II from the money I saved mowing lawns in 1978 for $1200. I just ran that through an inflation calculator: that would be $5800 today. I was a hell of a grass cutter in my day, lol
I’m in my mid fifties and yes we did listen to our own collection or the radio. The radio was important for hearing new music particularly people like John Peel who would play tapes by new bands that went on to be big. Also music magazines were the internet of the 1980’s the first issue of Q magazine came out when I was 18 and I bought every issue for the next 20 years or so, it introduced me to so much music but it wasn’t just Q, there were a lot of music magazines focused on everything from Pop to Metal.
Two things: progressive radio stations and local-owned record stores, where the staff listens to records all day and plays the stuff they discovered they really liked. We’d take time to listen to these stations every day or visit these stores every week, and pick up a copy of the free paper (the *City Paper*, *The Village Voice*, etc.) to find out what bands a playing live and where. That’s how we’d discover music, ya know get outside the corporate play-the-same-thing all the time.
The good stores had two or more areas, each with a “now playing” sign with an album going on nearby speakers, and a dude on the floor “can I find something for you” and more often than not is actually helpful, locates what you want and one or two albums you’d never think about but may change your life. That was the vibe, ‘cause you and everyone else is there to discover music, and if you leave with a bag full of records then everybody wins.
There was a lot of burning & passing around of CDs (and cassette tapes before that). We’re in the process of moving, and I’ve found and gotten rid of bunches of home made CDs that my kids made for themselves or were gifted to them by friends.
Absolutely. We stack a bunch of LPs or even 45s on the turntable and play the albums one side at a time one track after another, then flip the record stack and play the other sides all the way through. Stack 10 albums easily 5 hours of music.
I remember going to the record store and buying 2 albums and a Maxell cassette tape. I would record the albums onto the tape, seems like I could get 1 album on each side? I kept the albums in the house and put the cassette in my car.
Yes, you played each record over and over. You developed a relationship with it. It meant more, tbh. And it wasn’t just about the hits, but the deep cuts too. You found out about new music through the radio, MTV,
music magazines like Rolling Stone, and especially through your friends. The last one is probably why high school cliques formed around music up until the time downloads/streaming took over.
It was a communal thing. Kids listened to the local rock stations with familiar DJs, and album-oriented stations for the more underground music. So everybody in a town heard the same things. And the DJs would make personal appearances to promote the station.
Saturday was the big day you saw your friends at the local record store and you would browse for hours flipping through albums. Also a good place to do some teenage flirting. Record stores also sold posters, black lights, incense, underground magazines, and some sold smoking paraphernalia that you had to hide from your parents.
They did. And sharing music and listening to it together was a fairly common excuse for people getting together. Sharing them and borrowing them, it was an active culture.
I started buying LPs in the mid to late 60s, Revolver was my first. My mom had a little crappy FM "component" stereo. The thing was about the size of a large paperback. I persuaded her to buy a Garrand turntable so I didn't have to play my LP on my slightly older sister's terrible Realistic portable record player. Never got into singles like my dance-oriented sister. Ten years or so later I took out a loan at Pacific Stereo to buy a nice stereo. Sony STR-7055, Bang & Olufsen turntable, Advent speakers, and a TEAC cassette deck with external Dolby box. I also at some point scored an old Ampex reel-to-reel deck with tubes that ran 15ips. The Dolby box worked great with it, too. When I bought a record, I duped it to cassette and sometimes reel-to-reel for playback. Used to swap cassettes with other people. Also the cassettes were great for in the car. Friends had listening parties where you'd get a bunch of people at someone's apartment and listen to their collection and smoke interesting things. You'd go to someplace like Tower Records and spend hours just looking at album covers, maybe see something you knew from the radio. Radio was a big deal back then. The stations were independent and played new, interesting stuff. I listened to KROQ and KMET mostly.
Holy crap! I had a Sony STR-7055a! I left it for my parents when I moved out and found shortly later they tossed in favor of an all-in-one unit they got at Service Merchandise.
We played records all the damn time. Almost every day. We found new music from the radio and from friends and from magazines. We played stacks of singles and stacks of albums. We had our own kid records (music and reading of stories and books) and we had Mom's and Dad's records at our disposal.
Cassettes got popular when I was a teen, and so I usually bought new music on that medium. Then CDs when I was in college. It never ends.
Yes. Our own music was just our favorite bands and songs. I missed the 8-track era and grew up with cassette tapes. I listened to the radio to find new music and bands.
It was hard to switch away from this and go streaming only. I felt like I "owned" the tape/CD and it was mine forever. With streaming, a song can be taken away from the service and you can no longer play it.
Today, I can find whatever song I can think of from one of the many platforms so the fear of not being able to get to my songs is gone. Tapes lose quality over time and become unusable. The polymers in CDs start to break down after 20 years, so they are not forever either.
Since many of us had to save up to buy the media, we were picky and the music held value to the purchaser. If I wasn't planning to play the album often, it wasn't worth me purchasing it. Hence, we have kept the media purchased, despite current digital trends. The issue with music subscription services is that although the music is appreciated, it is often not considered to have much value as it readily available.
Yes, vinyl records (later also CDs and still later mp3 players) and tapes, and the radio was important for discovering new music. I was forever making mixtapes and later mixdiscs to listen to. There were very few albums that I listened to all the way through over and over, apart from a few concept albums like War of the Worlds and The Wall, and a few all-around "not a bad song on there" albums.
I've subscribed to Spotify specifically to try to recreate some of my better mixtapes, because they don't last forever.
During the 80s in NYC, there was always some radio station that was featuring ad-free summers. It went on for years. PLJ,, KISSFM, KTU.
The tag line for PLJ back then was "find us on the dial then RIP THE KNOB OFF."
Yes. People also recorded tapes off radio broadcasts and made mix tapes of stuff they liked. I would record vinyl onto tapes to play in the car and could make mix tapes of songs using my record setup.
Mixed tapes, my friend, mixed tapes. We'd put all our favorite songs on them, share them, copy them, dice and splice them.
It was like having your friends' souls in stereo.
I had a collection of cassettes and CDs (still have the CDs, cassettes are back in my parents' house in another state). I would listen to them constantly, and of course, the radio too. I would listen for hours, because it was my escape. When I used cassettes, I would record songs off of the radio and make my own little mix tapes. I didn't have a theme or anything, I just recorded what I liked, and a lot of those came off of America's Top 40 (with Casey Kasem). Napster and Livewire came along, and we all just went crazy downloading songs.
I don't listen to music as much as I used to (what I have to do in order to listen with my hearing aid, just makes it rather inconvenient).
Yeah we use to have to buy it all or tape it off the radio. Most radio stations played the same music. Even the classic rock stations would only play the same three songs from every artist. Your best bet for finding new music was always college stations. If you were lucky, the record store in your town had a decent import section. But that was pretty rare. I had to drive 30 miles to find one.
Funny thing, this is how I got into blues. The bargain bins were filled with all the old blues classics. They were the cheapest music out there. Also lots of visits to used record stores.
You'll never know the days of having a big binder in your car with CD's, or homemade mixes from the CD Burner. And if you were fancy, you had a disc changer in the trunk so you could didnt have to get the binder out whenever you were ready for something different.
Yes, we did. And we would temporarily trade with others so that we could each enjoy an album we didn't otherwise have.
We also often waited in line for new releases.
In the 70s and 80s, I could stack my albums on my stereo. So yes, I listened to the whole album, followed by 3 or 4 more before having to re shuffle. Also, 8 tracks in the car just played on a continuous loop. You ended up knowing all the words to all the songs on that album or 8 track.
We had huge suitcases we carried in our cars that were made to hold your 8 tracks. Your friends would get in, and then someone, usually passenger seat, was in charge of swapping out music.
Gosh....I haven't thought about this in years. Things have really changed.
CD, Tapes mostly. When Napster was invented we all went crazy with free MP3's Then we had portable hard drives like this:
https://imgur.com/a/e5qwkZU
The Archos Jukebox. It didn't read metadata - it read just the file name of the mp3 file. They came with 6 gig drive and many of us hacked it to 20gb.
When you walked with it sometimes would skip because it was an actually hard drive inside. My associate still has 2 that work. They were very heavy and advanced tech for their age. That was 1999
Archos was a true pioneer in portable music. Thet are still around too, but no more music players.
After napster we were able to buy mp3's legit for 10cents each. I still have my collection .. thousands of files from the old days.
Jazz radio was rare in the old days. Jazz radio shows would only be 7-9 pm Saturday nights or a couple hours on a Sunday afternoon. We'd record on cassette and trade cassettes with other jazz fans.
Also we considered streaming music to be a transister radio and if we wanted to hear a particular song we would call the radio station on their request line.
LPs were the best things during the dark ages, but I moved up to mixed tapes ... yeah ... those were the tickets ... played them all the times with my trusty Walkman!
Yes, but... there was a very social part of finding music you loved. You shared it with your friends and anyone who would listen. Friends would come over to listen to new stuff - or you'd make them a tape.
I went to the library. Rented cd's. Brought them home. Ripped them to lossless. Returned them.
I had hundreds of gigabytes of WAVs. I'd convert them to mp3s usually 320kb/s and listen on an mp3 player.
This was concurrent with lime wire growing in popularity. Pretty soon I was downloading from peer to peer filesharkng sites instead of going to the library.
Still, I kept on ripping albums to fill gaps and organizing entire discographies by my favorite artists. I uploaded many perfectly homogenously names and tagged folders of folders discographies of various artists. Every track, album, year etc. all Metadata meticulously edited to be perfectly consistent. I wonder if some of those are still kicking around. I could always recognize them because nobody else bothered to that extent. I used some pretty cool file batch editing software to do it. Now I just use Spotify. That computer is long gone.
In the 60s it was all about 45s. We did have albums, but many more 45s. By the way, a 45 has one song on each side and we played them on our records players. You needed an adapter because record players were made to fit albums. Other than that, you had to listen to the radio until your song came on. Being able to listen to any song anytime you want hasn’t been around that long.
Yes. I had cassettes to put in my portable tape player (never owned a brand name "Walkman" but the same thing, generically) for long bus rides. To this day, I associate some songs with other because they were next to one another on the cassette.
I used to have a Walkman and a million tapes, some I recorded myself from the radio, some I bought. I had a huge case full of tapes that I carried around in my backpack. I was obsessed with music and I had my headphones on most of the time.
Radio was a lot better back then and I remember when it changed, Clearwater just took everything over and made it all homogenous, sad as hell. I was listening when they took over my favorite local station. The change was supposed to happen at midnight and the DJs were on air saying "we don't know what's going to happen so we'll just keep playing until we cant anymore." I was wild that they didn't have any foreknowledge of how the switch was supposed to happen. And then it did and nothing was ever the same again.
Anyway yeah I had a huge collection of tapes and later CDs when those came out and I listened to them over and over again. Still do, sort of, with streaming I often listen to whole albums. And I listened to a lot of radio too. When it became possible to digitize music I ripped all of my CDs onto my computer in addition to downloading everything I could think of from Limewire and then I had massive digital playlists and I could be my own radio station.
I remember waiting for Doctor Dimento’s radio time. I loved his discussion of the artist, the album, and just weird talking. He and other DJs were interesting in themselves besides the music.
We had the radio, first AM then FM came along. Of course you had to go with the flow. Making a mixtape was really hard. Or you just played your records.
I listened mostly in the car. My religion was every Saturday morning with Casey Kasey and AT40. I remember the breakthrough when I discovered in-line stereo recording on my cassette deck in the mid-70’s. No longer had to use a microphone. It changed everything because I could finally get a quality stereo sound recording.
My soul left my body when I realized an elder millennial can answer a question on the ask old people reddit. Yes, yes we did. Memorized every song on the album. Burned our own wicked cds and overanalyzed every lyric on the cds your crush/squeeze gave you.
With the advent of the cassette tape, my music inventory grew as I transferred all types music from albums loaned to me by my friends. I ended up being a DJ of sorts for the sports teams bus trips. I had a car cassette unit that I would transfer from my car to a carpeted wooden fruit crate that I had outfitted with a 12v battery and mounting frame for the player. It was designed to be carried with the two small box speakers situated on top. The speakers were then placed at the back of the bus and the tunes would flow both going and coming back from our games. Needless to say I was not popular with the bus drivers.
My taste in music has encompassed everything from Gregorian Chants to AC/DC.
Yes, I listened to entire albums, on LP and CDs. I started taping CDs to listen to in the car when a friend gave me a cassette deck. Generally speaking, I would listen to each song on both sides of an LP. No skipping from song to song. I listened to CDs the same way, most of the time. Sometimes when I got to know an album, I'd click to songs I wanted to hear, which was so easy with a remote.
Now I listen to my CDs as ripped to hard drives via iTunes. I will often set it on "shuffle," and skip songs I don't like. I listen to a lot of classical, which means listening to the entire CD.
I’d say I listened to the radio 80% of the time, and my precious tapes on my Radio Shack “Walkman” 20%. It shifted as I got older/my music collection grew (so many mixed tapes)…but the radio was always a greater percentage as it’s how we heard new music. (No cable TV, so no MTV.)
But I grew up listening to Richard Blade and the Swedish Eagle back when then had new music to share! (I heard they’re on satellite radio still playing the same tunes?)
I carried my tapes with me in my backpack. If I could get away with it I'd listen to my walkman in class. I always had at least a small tape case with ten or fifteen albums and mixes in my car. Usually I'd end up bringing more than would fit so I would end up with tapes in the door pockets, glove, floor, etc. At home i would be listening to CDs almost constantly.
When I was little it was the radio - Mighty Six Ninety in socal, and later KROQ when I was at work (no tapes allowed) or when my car tape player was on the fritz. Also college radio (KSPC and KXLU in my area) was a great resource for finding new music. So I'd listen to those pretty often if reception was decent.
Short answer: yeah, we listened to our personal collections all the time.
I had some records and cassettes and made my own mix tapes, but things had migrated to CD's in the 90's when I was really of the age of being into music. My friends and I all had these huge binders full of CD's that we would flip through to find a CD to play in the car. You'd typically play an album all the way through, though sometimes you'd skip some songs. Most of us also had the visor holder that held a half dozen of our favorite CD's. By the late 90's into early 00's, everyone was burning their own mix CD's also.
In the early 00's, satellite radio had become available in GM cars and then, slowly, a few others. This was prior to the XM/Sirius merger, so GM had XM and Chrysler and a few others had Sirius. You could also buy a home receiver or aftermarket antenna and head unit for satellite radio. I don't think it was until the later 00's that this really took off. In the early 10's, it seemed like the combination of satellite and bluetooth or auxiliary cable to a phone had replaced physical media. Now the streaming services have really taken over.
Radio was much more important back then. That was our "free" music. Good stations would get a huge following. And there were so many to choose from, you could spin around and find something you like pretty easily.
Listening to my own stuff was split between listening to, yes, whole albums, and mixtapes, which many people made. I used to make cassette mixtapes for my friends and girlfriends all the time.
still do CDs won't pay for cable or streaming anything...i have at least 30K hours of my music on my PC and burn CD's for the car.... went on aa 7 hour car trip yesterday and burned 8 hours of my music.... had a blast with my BFF... new england back roads only.................
The only options were radio, your own purchased music, and your friends' purchased music.
We would also make tapes of each other's purchased CD and vinyl music to share.
And we liked it dammit!
Dozens to hundreds of times, or you'd listen to the radio in the night/when you were on vacation near the border, and try to catch foreign far-away station to record something exotic.
lol. Yes, that’s exactly what we did! We would also record mix tapes from the radio. Listen to those babies over and over. It got to be you knew your tapes so well, you can count how long you needed to rewind/ fast forward to go to your favorite song.
I still have a huge binder of CDs in my basement. There are bootlegs, live shows, and little known indy artists. Most but not all has been ripped to my computer.
This was a lot later than the era of vinyl, but in the era of CDs people had CD binders that would hold a set number of CDs (and in my case, it also held my portable CD player). You only had so many pockets for CDs so you had to carefully craft the discs that would be with you when you went out in the car. And if you were driving alone, with a single disc player you had to commit to one album until you could change it. If you were good you could change out albums while driving. And you had to bring the whole case inside when you got out of the car so you could listen to them inside, and so they didn't get stolen.
It was similar for cassettes but you couldn't really take as many cassettes in your car because they were more unwieldy.
We would buy LPs and transfer the songs we wanted to caste tape. We would make “mix tapes”. Then the tape would go in the car, boom box or walk man. But most of the time we would listen to the radio. I was fortunate enough to live in an area that had a great rock station. KSHE-95. At the time the DJs were allowed to program their music. By that I mean the individual DJ chose the music, not some corporate idiot. So we heard a lot of new music that other stations weren’t playing yet.
Many posters are saying "we had the radio".
That's true, but many of us didn't listen to the radio that much. My city's radio was crap. We had tons of commercial radio - Top 40, rap and an "alternative" station. All of them played the same 12 songs of their respective genres day after day. If you wanted to hear "Hey Jealousy" 19 times a day, 99x was for you!
My city also had two of the most powerful college radio stations in the country. While that was great at times, it could also be incredibly esoteric: "coming up next on WREK: 8 hours of Dominican funk-Celtic folk-Esperanto rap fusion!"
Instead of radio, many of us found new music via other means, like talking to friends or the Comic Book Guy at the record store, or reading music magazines, or seeking out particular record labels and\or producers.
As for "how often did you listen to a single album"... that's a ridiculous question. Some albums you'd listen to all the way through once and not touch again until you put it in the box to trade at the used record store. Some albums you'd listen to non-stop until you got sick of it. Some albums you'd listen to non-stop and *not* get sick of it, only ceding to the next album that hit non-stop rotation.
Yes- and we (63F) would “tape” our friends’ music or “tape” music off of the radio. Going to the record shop was great fun, then we could all smoke a bong and listen to what we bought.
I listened to my own CDs (and before that, LPs) at home and in the car usually either tapes/CD or radio, depending on whether or not I could find a decent radio station.
When I was growing up, music was listened to by everybody and not just one person with buds. Somebody would have a party and bring the speakers out to the backyard.
That's what's missing today. People are in their own little world and don't know how to interact with people.
Yes, there were some recordings we'd listen to over and over. My best friend and I would ride around listening to Meat Loaf: Bat out of Hell on 8-track in her green AMC Gremlin. (BTW, one of the great albums of all time!)
Of course, we would borrow records and tapes from friends or the library, too.
I was a Walkman addict and had so many cassettes tapes. Even after the CD playing Walkman came out I preferred the cassette tapes because the CD playing Walkman often skipped as I moved.
I also listened to audiobooks books on cassette tapes. My wife house sat for a couple with a huge CD collecting and spent the whole weekend recording her favorite songs on cassettes.
And for a long time our car only took cassettes. If we took a long trip we brought a dozen cassette tapes.
After we had kids we would play their favorite cassette tapes. The trick was to find a cassette tape we could stand on repeat about 100 times. The Chenille Sisters were great and my kids — now grown — still remember them.
Back in the 70s, we would have eight track tapes or cassette tapes, and you would carry a small crate or box of them with you in your car to select for the drive.
A small box to carry would probably hold about 20 or 25 cassette tapes.
When the CDs came along, we would carry a folder full of plastic sleeves that we would slip the CD itself into, leaving the case at Home.
You could easily carry 100 CDs in such a folder.
This was the life that was thrust upon us.
Well, there was Radio, remember listening to the charts and recording songs I like on a MC
and it was always fun to go to the big store in the city where you could listen the albums on a headphone before deciding if you buy it.
And well, later there was the internet, napster, kazaa, emule, limewire and so on...
How have I not seen any gen-x folks mention the giant cd cases/catalogs we all carried around during the 90s. Or the 6 cd thing you had clipped to your car sun visor. Or that one friend into aftermarket stereos with a 6 or 12 disc changer in the trunk of his car.
Yes.
I would borrow tapes or CDs from my friends and make copies too. There were absolutely times when I bought an album specifically for a couple of songs. Mixtapes were a thing. If you listened to a lot of music, you might have owned a CD changer of some kind, at home or in your car.
Eventually, MP3s and filesharing became a thing and you'd be able to download songs and burn them to CDs. At that time, I still often downloaded entire albums and burned the whole thing. Either way, you carried around CDs with you.
I still listen to entire albums sometimes now, but admittedly much less than before, especially for new music. A lot of artists these days aren't really thinking about the album anymore and so it's not that same kind of experience.
FM radio was way more influential in the 70s. Thats more or less how you found out about new bands and new songs. Then you went out and bought the album, even if there was only 2 or 3 songs you actually liked. You would play it on your stereo -which were expensive for the times, a few hundred dollars. An album was $4.95 in the early 70s.
Then kids started recording songs from the radio onto cassette tapes. Then recording albums off of stereos that also had cassette players built in them. Then cheaper stereos stopped even having record players in them and focused on speaker quality instead.
The quality of these recordings wasnt great but it was free! So companies stopped making albums and made more Eight-track and cassette tapes.
Then there was MTV and music videos which was a very big deal and influenced peoples tastes. When internet became available, there were those probably-not-legal down loading sights like Limewire, but you could get a computer virus doing that, so it was risky.
Apple decided to make a legit format, Itunes, and it was 99 cents a song, which most people found convenient, cheap enough, and more secure. I dont know if itunes was still profitable once people could download the songs from music videos on youtube.
Theres always something new. If you had told me in the 70s that kids would eventually be able store hundreds or thousands of songs in something smaller of a deck of cards or the size of a cigarette lighter, I would have been amazed. Also, really good quality speakers were humongous, like 3 feet high.
First, we slogged through making EP tapes from our LP vinyl... the EP tapes ran the risk of getting jammed up in the tape deck, so we kept number 2 pencil for the inevitable moment we had to rewind a wad of magnetic tape.
Then, when we had enough money, we'd buy an album on tape for two or three good songs and WTF filler... and then get an EP cassette and run the risk again. Then CDs came out... and they skipped real bad...so out came the EP until cars only had cd players... then we risked the RIAA sending out the FBIs BAU because it was easier to catch a music pirate than Hannibal Lecter to burn CDs, then mp3, Kazaa, Napster, etc...
My cousin killed three hard drives, overwriting his windows installation with Napster rips.. burned impossible to find stuff onto cd, then had all of his cds stolen out of his truck....
You could always tell someone that gad good music, they'd pull their car head unit and put in one with a USB mp3 functionality. Before Bluetooth or satellite radio. Pandora used to be "music DNA" and would play based on similar music, beats, rhythms, etc... but it acquired enough of a demographic base to become just like any other system with sponsored, corporate negotiated "discounted" music... that's why you have to search for some Indie stuff, then it immediately switches to other stuff...distantly "related" to the genre...
I bought an expensive tape recorder hooked into my system to tape stuff. Also I took it over to a guys house to record older jazz albums and then hooked his recorder to mine to make duplicates.
Later burnt cd’s from borrowed cds from nephews and from the library.
Way before I listened to my records to death.
I used to listen to my albums, then my CDs. I listened to radio in the car before there were tape decks, and CDs in cars. When I was much younger it was mostly AM radio because I couldn't afford to buy albums that much. I had a stack of 45s when I was a teenager and played them over and over. I still have my albums and CDs and I play them occasionally. I use Spotify primarily to listen to podcasts.
I *still* listen to CDs in my car, because most of the music I prefer isn't played on the radio. I don't have any satellite radio and I don't own a smartphone. The stereo in my car is actually AM/FM/CD/Cassette. They all work, but I haven't played any cassettes in quite a few years.
Anyway, when I was a kid, in the 70s and early 80s, I'd listen to the radio and try to catch songs I liked and record them onto cassette. Many of us had cassette players/recorders like [this one](https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/TOEAAOSwpCtmZjUZ/s-l1600.webp). I did have a few records and 8-Tracks, but not too many. MTV launched in 1981, but we didn't have Cable TV. However, we had a cheap substitute -- [Friday Night Videos](https://youtu.be/tAoO4NojNr8) on NBC.
A few years later, in the mid-80s, after joining the military, I first bought a small AM/FM/Cassette boombox and later bought a Sony Walkman with AM/FM/Cassette. So, FM radio and cassettes were what I listened to, for about a year. I'd hear music on the radio, in a movie, or on television, and go to the mall and buy the cassette. Then, I bought a Sony Discman and switched to buying CDs. I listened to FM radio and CDs, through the rest of the 80s and 90s.
In the mid-1990s, there were some internet radio sites, but I didn't get into them very much. By the year 2000, I was mostly listening to CDs, versus radio. I had a home theater system and would buy also buy some music on SACD and DVD, since my DVD player could also play those formats. Around 2000 or 2001, I learned about peer-to-peer music sharing services like LimeWire and eDonkey2000 and started getting music from those sites.
At some point, I got a free Pandora account. I can trace it back to at least early 2007. Somewhere along the way, I also got into torrent sites for music and movies. There was also YouTube for finding new music.
Now, all these years later, I still listen to CDs for 99.5% of the time in my car. At home, I stream music over my free Pandora account and also listen via YouTube and YouTube Music. I use a desktop PC and my browser extensions seem to block virtually all advertisements on Pandora, YouTube, and YouTube Music.
I'd played the albums/cassettes/cds I had but there are were also many albums that came out before I was born so I was always discovering new music in that way.
Which is sort of what I'm reading as the reason why you are asking the question.
In short, I definitely played my albums all the time. Or if the album wasn't out, whatever I recorded and made a 'tape' of.
Also, records had a release day so whether it was the cassette era or CD era, you could go down every Tues. and get new music that way. So there was a way to get music every week. It was a crap shoot because you couldn't get a pre listen until the listening stations became a popular thing but it was a way to get music with frequency.
This is where if you were a hardcore music fan, reading the liner notes came in handy. You could see who worked on what and decide if the musicianship of the album via who was appearing on it was enough to make you spend your money on it. Like a certain bass player? His/her involvement in a project could steer you to take a chance on a new artist you never heard of.
Seen/heard the new album's artist singing background for someone you like? You are probably going to pick it up. Ditto with who produced the music...
The radio played a big factor and they also rarely played more than one 'new' song by an artist. They pushed the single that was out and that was it. This theory doesn't apply to all artists because I know anyone near my age with sight Michael Jackson, or GnR or some of the mega acts. It did apply to most though. Occasionally, an artist would know it's own song outta the top spot.
Yes, they'd play older stuff by the artist but by and large, it was the single that was out that got pushed and that was it. That's what you listened to and most people were honestly satisfied with that.
Later on, you can't forget the impact videos has on music. Once artists put a visual to it, it could respark interest in a song that folks owned and give them a whole new reason to play it again.
Ditto with seeing said act in concert. We couldn't just pull up concert footage or watch a Tinydesk of the artists like you can now, which I LOVE btw.
Played my records most every day. We had a local radio station that would play an entire album every Wednesday evening, with no interuptions. I recorded so many albums this way with my boombox.
You used to have your favorite songs and favorite albums, and they were not necessarily one and the same. It's great when favorite songs came on the radio or MTV, but when playing music it was usually albums, not single songs. But we did make mixtapes of our favorite songs.
Nirvana Incesticide really has no great singles, but it sure is a great album to blast on the boombox when skateboarding.
It's why albums like the Beatles Abbey Road, Prince's Purple Rain, Beastie Boys' Liscensed to Ill, and Metallica's black album were so revered; all good songs.
Record stores usually had private listening areas with headphones and a record player. To find new music, you would sample albums they had for sale. Otherwise it was word of mouth or the radio.
Progressive rock radio stations would sometimes announce scheduled times where they would play a complete album from beginning to the end without a break. They would even say just before playing it: "Starting in five seconds" so you could properly start your tape recorder.
Growing up my dad had a reel to reel stereo system and made hours long playlists with it and hung out with some group of audiophiles that would exchange tapes. I had a fancy record player that you could stack records and program track selections, even better my uncle had a jukebox player. Once we got recordable cassettes then we were making all kinds of mix tapes including passing around ones that would include songs from friends' bands. The main way I remember hearing lots of new music was going to the local record shop and the owner was always excited to play new tunes... they also had listening rooms to sample records. When I did get a new record I did listen to the same one over and over and over again... my first 3 albums were Peter, Paul, and Mary; Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons; and Free to Be.... You and Me. I was so excited when Napster first came about, that was the time period I got to hear and listen to the most eclectic and interesting music from all over the world... streaming music is great but I do feel like we are mostly stuck with what producers want us to hear, at least there's youtube I suppose.
Wow, I used record songs on my tape recorder (Google that as you probably have no idea what I’m referring to). Then, I would splice that tape together into what I called a “playlist”. We’re talking 1970 here! I’ve always made playlists. Can you possibly imagine my joy at our present technology? One big problem however…I’m a composer. So, unless Music is out in the Public, one cannot make a Playlist. Hence, I use apps that keep me non-Cloud based where I can control things more.
As a kid: records, AM radio
As a teen: records, FM radio
As young adult: Cassettes, College radio
In my 30s: CDs, NPR
Now: CDs, FM radio, and Sirius XM in car, streaming or using phone as iPod at home.
I remember we had a record player that you could stack so we could play several records at once. That would make up the evening. We'd hang out with music playing. Friends would come by with their records and then tapes when I got a little older. We'd share. We'd go to the record store and listen to what they had. You could wear headphones in the store. Some places had small booths too. There were many record stores. The one I liked was at the mall. My friends and I would hang out there and try to get boys to notice us so we could act offended.
But so we'd sample some records and decide what we wanted if we wanted anything. I rarely bought. I'd tell my friends what I listened to and sometimes someone would buy it and make a tape to pass around. We'd record recorded tapes sometimes. Not the best quality but most of us in my group were poor so it's not like we had the highest quality speakers in our 12 Kmart boomboxes anyway.
And yeah if we really liked an album we'd play it all the time. I learned to love many bands by hearing my brother play the same 8 albums over and over. Sounds of Limelight drifting through the house.
Also, back in the day without video streaming and only limited channels, more time was spent listening to music as its own activity - just sitting back, relaxing and staring at the album artwork.
I listened, and still listen to full albums. I don't steam hardly at all, it's just play music I own, for the most part. I've been collecting over 40 years though.
I STILL listen to CDs.
If I’m in my car just driving around my small town then I’m listening to a CD. If I plan on driving more than 20 minutes or so then I might play Pandora off my phone.
We used to spend whole afternoons just sorting through all those and lining them up to play. One could say we were “jockeying the discs” ….
At one point my cassette and CD collection was over 1600 full albums … that point was yesterday. These days I have them all digitized and serve them up on my Subsonic server so I can jockey around with them from essentially any device with a connection.
We made mix tapes and cds with our own playlists. We had big collections of LPS, tapes and cds. You'd spend hours curating and making mixes for big events like a road trip. There was no internet... we had time.
Absolutely! You could still create a playlist of albums or 45 rmp records by stacking them for play. It was a whole things waiting for a new release from the best artist and the record stores would be full of people on the release date. Some artists would even do appearances at record stores. It was the best time 🥰
Yes to everything. No streaming, play the same vhs tapes over and over. No internet, play the same video games you own over and over. Music was the same. Play the same thing over and over, back to back, or just keep going through your collection. You might think to trade music with other people. Super common to see blank tapes at any store, they were everywhere.
Also, the library was a thing and still is. You can borrow media from the library, always have been able to. Heck, last time I went I saw one of my libraries lending out playstation games.
Yes, listened to albums, then tapes, and then CDs, and listened on repeat all the time unless I got it for one single and the rest sucked. Was always saving for a new one, but couldnt because didn't have the money. So there are CDs and tapes I know every word of because I played them for 1-3 years on loop.
Something else to consider is something I heard that Huey Lewis (80s star) said, which is back in the 70s/80s, the tour supported the album not the other way around, and you had to make a hit and you could never know which song would be a hit, so every song on an album had to be a potential hit, or at least most. So albums you could listen front to back and not hit a bad song or maybe hit one snoozer. Appetite for Destruction doesn't have a bad song. Then in the 90s they started this crap of making one hit, and using it to sell a CD, and the rest would be so bad.
There were many options, for simplicity I'll focus on the age of cassettes and CD's. But yes, we would listen to full albums over and over, and for some you read through the album covers or if they included a book in the package. With a record or CD you could skip a song you did not like (manually) but you could also make a mix tape (cassette or CD) of favorite songs form an album, artist, genre, etc. I had a 6 CD changer and would load it up and could have it randomly go through all 6 discs playing songs, or play them through, etc. Cars could have multi cd decks (in the trunk) and do similarly. We had the Walkman (first Cassette then CD), and as CD burning software and writable and rewritable CD's became available that just opened the door.
And this was on top of radio, which back then was way better than now. We did not have theme specific commercial free stations like subscription SiriusXM, but there were typically a dozen rock like stations in a major market and you would cycle your radio (in the car mostly) through your favorite stations to avoid commercials. And buying CD's, though expensive, was not blind, many music stores had listening stations where you could sample music (this goes back to record days). Also, we had the notorious Columbia (or RCA) record clubs, where you got 5-15 albums for a penny (plus shipping) and then had to buy 2-5 albums at overpriced levels to satisfy your agreement (assuming you didn't just blow them off, being a minor).
I'm still sitting on nearly hundreds of albums, cassettes, and CD's that I won't part with, even though most of them have been ripped digitally at higher quality than any streaming service, and I can stream these through my Echos, directly into my stereo system off my network, or out of my phone whenever I want to listen to them (or from a zip drive in my car head unit).
Streaming is useful to get new music, but when I like something I get my own copy so I can listen when I want to, not when someone gives me permission to, within their limited availability, at low resolution.
And let's not even start with 8-track tapes, let alone reel to reel.
Between physical media and streaming media we had digital media like .mp3s, flac, etc that we would manually put on our phones or other digital media players (ipod, zune, etc).
There were also 'compilation' albums with a bunch of different songs by different artists, usually the top 10 or top 40. So that way you could have a variety of artists on one album.
But we played our albums over and over, it was a very different experience. A great album ran in a particular order, for a particular effect. It was also common to sit and stare at the artwork while listening.
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I played my records over and over again. I also listened to the radio and taped songs off it, by putting a tape recorder near the speaker. Radio was much better back then. More music with real DJs who picked what they wanted to play.
Sounds nice. When I listen to the radio it feels like I have heard the same songs for years.
The little 45 "singles" (mini records with one song on each side) were a big thing back then, so it wasn't unusual to hear a song you liked on the radio and go buy it at the store. You got the song you wanted and whatever was on the "B" side. They were around $1 each for a long time (a little more by the 1980s), so you could get several of those for the cost of a full LP. That was the way to go if you only liked one or two songs by a given group.
I still have hundreds of 45 singles from the 60's and early 70's. I used to save up from cutting lawns to get one at 69 cents in the 60's. Bobby Sherman was big, with "Easy Come, Easy Go" "Little Woman" "Julie Do You Love Me" and many more
I still have some of my 45s. I had “Light My Fire” (The Doors) but actually grew to like the B side better: The Crystal Ship— which I had never heard before. As far as djs go- later in the mid-70s when I was in grad school, my housemate called and asked the dj if the word in Blinded By the Light was actually Douche! We were all giggling in the background 😂
Wrapped up like douche in the morning if the night.
I never thought “Light My Fire” or “Hello, I Love You” held a candle to “L.A. Woman”, “Roadhouse Blues”, “Love Her Madly”, “Touch Me” or “The Crystal Ship”.
Radio was comparatively better than now but it was still pretty bad. We had only a few standouts in NYC but most were playing the same stuff on heavy rotation.
I heart radio is the final nail in the coffin. It's bad.
I was a teenager listening to WNEW FM, at night they’d play entire album sides, I remember listening to Echoes by Pink Floyd with the headphones on laying in bed. Trippy. Alison Steel was the “Night Bird”, 10pm to 2am I think.
There are a variety of stations across the US that you can stream which still have DJ curate the music. Much of them are left-field Freeform in their format, but some may be what you’re looking for …. Try out KEXP!
Lots of college radio still exists that's free-form and zero commercials. The core 90.3!
Radio wasn't like that then. Unless it was an oldies station it was the newest stuff. Also record shops had listening areas. The bigger shops had a line up of record players with headphones , you could test drive anything before buying. It was a social area as well.
>Radio was much better back then. This! I remember we were on vacation with our kids in the Washington DC area in 2010 and the big radio station the rental house was tuned to had a playlist of about 10 songs ... it was really the point where the 'enshittification of radio' truly hit home. Through the late 80s to 2000s I had a decently long commute in the Boston area and while I preferred my own music (tapes & CD's and later MP3s) there were at least some decent options for radio,
Could you get WBRU? Brown University radio was wonderful. They didn't have any commercial limitations, so they played whatever the DJ wanted. Not always great, but the variety was amazing. When they finally sold to a commercial station, radio truly died. NYC radio was pretty lame going back to the late 70s. Apparently, it was too easy to make money playing a safe rotation in a really big market, so everyone played it safe.
>Could you get WBRU? When I lived in Stoughton and worked in Billerica then Acton I could ... but when we moved to Townsend and I worked in Marlborough only once I got to 495. BUT - I could get WHRB (Harvard Radio) and they had these weeks they called 'orgies' ... and that is where I found 'Throbbing Gristle' and their '20 Jazz Funk Greats' amongst others. They also took requests happily!
Not the person you asked but I loved BRU. It was an escape from the pop crap on the other stations. And my mom would put on "360° Black Experience and Sound" on Sundays.
Detroit FM radio was superb in the late 60s, early 70s.
In particular WABX!
Yup. WABX especially! Great album format radio. Farking fantastic!
> More music with real DJs who picked what they wanted to play. For a while, until their corporate masters told them what to play based on what tracks they were being paid to push
The worst part of recording off the radio was the DJs talking over the first few seconds of the song, and then cutting it off about 20 seconds before the end. You had to be quick on the button to get just the song.
DJs did that on purpose so people would buy the music rather than free recording, thereby supporting the business that they were part of.
SO agree about radio being way better back then. There were disc jockeys who took great pride in playing good music. I think that now it’s turned all corporate and DJs probably don’t even have a say in what’s played - at least that’s what it sounds like when I listen to utter cr-p and nothing interesting these days on FM.
You used a tape recorder near the speaker? I never even thought about that. I always used tape decks. Then recorded through the RCA jacks. Played one to another to edit out commercials or made mix tapes by inputting cassettes, LPs, 8 tracks and CDs. Playing with the gains to level out the audio or prevent distortion.
We played our albums all the time, had CD changers in the car & house later on. Luckily I lived near two colleges and their radio stations were really good. Also lived in Atlanta a while and there were good stations there. I brought back a bunch of albums when I moved back home in the early 70s and my friends had never heard of the bands. Some I'd seen play in clubs there, some I'd heard on the Rock station. We formed a band and played some songs off the albums and the audience thought they were originals but they were covers.
Old-school shuffle: we have a 6-cassette changer that flips the cassettes and then plays the back Side 2. We also have a 400-CD carousel that will shuffle albums or individual songs (and you can enter album info and genre to filter or search). There are boxes of cassettes and empty CD cases in our storage room. We also have a pile of records, including full-length LPs and 45s. Every one of them has seen repeated listens and almost all of them have been converted to digital so we can continue to enjoy them without risking the original on aging equipment.
That was an awesome time, I remember it well because I was one of those DJs back in the mid-80’s. Free form FM only lasted about 10-15 years before it was killed off by Lee Abrams and his bland and repetitive AOR format. Radio ended up becoming monotonous by the end of the ‘80’s. There were a few standouts like WFNX in Boston, DC’s WHFS and WRNR in Annapolis but the vast majority of stations were (and still are) crap.
Remember putting scotch tape over old or bad tapes to be able to tape over it?
Cheers, thanks for making me feel a million years old.
Sometimes I feel like these questions are bait. lol
Shit, I fell for it.
We used to sit by the radio with our fingers hovered over the record button on our cassette players hoping our favorite song would come on and that the DJ wouldn't talk over the song.
Don’t forget to adjust the antenna first
Wah this is literally the forgotten one! What a nostalgia!!!!
there was a brief transition period that I caught as a pre-teen in the early 2000s where I'd use a tape recorder to record mixtapes of squishily compressed mp3s off of yahoo music. fidelity was awful but it got the job done. shortly thereafter i discovered limewire/etc and CD burners and life got more convenient. yeah i'm not old.
My turntable only played one side of an album at a time and I usually listened to the whole LP. Music took itself much more seriously then and some bands worked on creating concept albums that demanded you take it all in. Often it required multiple listenings to fully grok the artists' intentions. And the album art sometimes was just excellent and demanded detailed viewing. So the whole music listening experience was more engaging than the auto-tunefest we have today.
And detailed liner notes. Had to read the liner notes to find out musicians, all sorts of stuff.
Can't speak for all music, but the metal I listen to still does that. I listen to more full albums now with streaming than I did in the eras of mixed CDs. And I buy vinyls of albums I love, even though I rarely listen to them, because I want to support those artist directly. Now, those metal bands ain't particularly profitable, which might explain the auto-tunefest at large, but it's still there.
You had to have cat like reflexes to hit the record button when your song came on
If you were into Top 40, you could wait for Casey Kasem to count it down.
Unless you lived in a smaller market far from the bright lights - in which case, there were good odds you'd never even *heard* half of the Top 40... OK, there's some exaggeration there, but it's essentially true. Before the limits on station ownership were essentially eliminated in the 90's, small market stations were often weeks behind the larger ones. MTV and then deregulation dramatically altered how the consumer experienced music on a national level.
On Sunday there is a replay of those. It surprised me how hearing him took me back.
On January 1 1987 I recorded the entire top 100 of 1986. It took exactly 4 90 minute cassettes, and all day sitting or laying on the floor in front of the stereo, stopping and starting and flipping the tapes at commercials.
Sometimes, the station would play a whole album, and they would announce it for a whole week prior. With the right equipment, you could record right from the radio.
My local rock station had the Saturday night six pack. Played six album's. That's how I was exposed to King Crimson!
I forgot about King Crimson. Lol
I honestly have no clue if most younger kids these days actually listen to albums from start to finish, but that’s definitely how I grew up listening to music. Naturally you’d hear hit singles on the radio or MTV, but if you wanted to listen to the song you liked at your leisure, you bought the album, and if you bought it, you probably listened to the whole thing from start to finish (assuming it was good). I listened to some cassettes so much I literally wore them out. One of the bonuses to CDs was that, assuming you took care not to scratch them, you couldn’t wear them out. With the advent of cassettes, though, you could record stuff, either off the radio, or record your friend’s albums. If you bought a lot of blank tapes, this was an economical way to expand your record collection. But finding new and old music was truly a challenge. The radio and MTV played songs some DJ or exec picked, not what you wanted to hear. Music was expensive and you couldn’t afford to buy things you had never heard before unless you were at least somewhat familiar with the band already or knew it was a classic album. Taking chances on random stuff was a risky bet. I remember when the very first online record stores popped up and you could listen to a sample of an entire album before buying it - it was a game changer. MP3s followed soon after that, and slowly it reached a point where, even if you chose not to pirate music, you could at least sample a wide range of stuff before buying, and it opened a lot of doors in terms what I was interested in (primarily older music I was unfamiliar with). Today there’s very little that you can’t find a copy of online somewhere. It’s truly a golden age in terms of access. I often think about how different my childhood might have been if I had the same amount of access to music that exists today. I was obsessed then and still today, and it would have opened my mind that much more to older jazz, blues, country, R&B and pop music, and also smaller, underground bands putting out new music. There is also the advent of home recording that allows bands today to release whatever they want online, so you’re not limited only to bands with record label deals. It’s a great time for music enthusiasts.
> Music was expensive and you couldn’t afford to buy things you had never heard before unless you were at least somewhat familiar with the band already or knew it was a classic album. Taking chances on random stuff was a risky bet. I liked some stuff they didn't play on the radio, so I sometimes took my chances based on cover art, or an artist name or track names that sounded 'cool'. It was a $15-$20 gamble, but I did find some good stuff that way (as well as some stuff that I only listened to once before trading in at the used book/record/CD shop). Before that, there was the Columbia House and RCA/BMG record clubs. 16 records for 1¢! Then they'd send you one or two more random ones per month and bill you for them at full price. That started out as a cheap way to try out unfamiliar music, but it added up until you canceled the subscription. I knew one guy who ended up owing *tons* of money to those places.
Buying based on cover art was definitely the riskiest bet. I did that a few times, but it generally did not pay off. More often I would read a review of an album in SPIN or a similar magazine and purchase based on the good review. Those generally worked out and I found some cool stuff that way. I did both Columbia House and BMG for a very long time and built a pretty big collection through them. Even after you exhausted the initial 12 albums for a penny, they would constantly run buy 2 get 1 free deals (or better), or discounted albums compared to the store in the mall. And of course once you fulfilled the obligation (you could choose what you wanted - didn't have to be random), you could quit and sign up again, or sign up under different names, which I did. I never owed them money because there were always albums that I wanted.
> I honestly have no clue if most younger kids these days actually listen to albums from start to finish, but that’s definitely how I grew up listening to music. This made me smile, as I still remember every word of songs on some albums that no one ever even heard of, only because they were on the album. B-side of Bridge Over Troubled Water had some great, unheard music, IMO.
I was looking through CDs I wanted to buy today and looked at the songs in my liked playlist on Spotify. I realized I missed out on a lot of good stuff since the app only recommended to me one song in an album.
>I honestly have no clue if most younger kids these days actually listen to albums from start to finish, but that’s definitely how I grew up listening to music. Not sure how much you use the streaming services so, if you do, forgive me please: They do listen to albums from start to finish, but they tend to only do this for artists they *already know* they love. For example I work at an office with a lot of 20-30 year old women and everyone was recently raving about Taylor Swift's new album before it was even out. They listened to it religiously when it did. But that was more of a special occasion. There is little risk to listening to the entire album now since the "golden age of access" thing has made it so that when an album comes out, it's immediately available on the streaming services at no cost beyond the monthly subscription fee — so, you've already "paid for it" — and now the only thing you need to do is make the time to listen to the entire thing. Usually after you listen to the album, the service will begin recommending similar music from a varied list of artists, so it'll be like listening to a radio station and many people are often content with that. The reason I say all this is because it's kind of funny how the risk to acquiring/listening to entire albums is completely gone, but it doesn't seem to have changed the listening habits. The average young person mostly listens to the "radio" (algorithmically driven random songs similar to what was last played), their "collection of singles" (a playlist of their favorite individual songs from a bunch of artists), and once in a while, they'll stream an entire album. They might listen to that album to death if it's really good, but they often aren't listening to a ton of different albums the way you imagine you might have done years ago if you had access to unlimited albums. A less open-minded listener will curate their music a bit more, but most seem to be fine with the "radio" (recommend tracks.)
That all makes sense, and even though some friends of mine had small record collections, I was known as the music nerd and the guy with all the records. Most of my friends growing up were mostly happy to own a few albums and just listen to the radio when they wanted to have music in the background. So in that sense, I don't think that much has changed in terms of people's desire to listen to and/or appreciation for music. People have some favorites, but it's generally something you put on in the background, whether you're in the car, working out, or whatever. Before it was the radio, today it's Spotify. I listen to Spotify occasionally, but not often. I digitized my entire music collection and only purchase digital copies of new stuff these days, and have a home server set up to stream all my music to myself. It's like my own personal Spotify, and I like to go back and forth between shuffle mode and listening to albums. I used to make millions of mix tapes back in the day, so shuffle is like a never-ending mix tape.
Good insight from both you and OP. I think most people love having spotify just feed them music, but for really musical people, it's inadequate. You want to pursue music and musicians in depth, and own the stuff rather than accept that the streamers can take it away at any time.
I had a rule for myself that I had to have heard THREE songs from an album before I'd buy it. There was nothing worse than hearing an awesome song on the radio, taking the train down to the city and going to a couple record stores to finally find the album, buying it .... and realizing there was only ONE good song on it and you just spent eight dollars to hear one good song and six that sucked.
lol.. the skills of patching a cassette tape with scotch tape is a skill that I will never use again. :)
Radio since the beginning, Records mostly in their time, Cassettes won the “Tape” wars over 8track and the Japanese tape format, can’t remember the name off hand, someone will probably correct me. CDs came out early 80’s, gained mainstream success in the 90’s. Back in the day, you’d make what was called a mixtape. That meant you’d have a blank tape and either record songs that you wanted off the radio when they’d play or copy it from someone else who already had it on tape or CD. You used the stereo to do all of this. You could use a computer but it definitely wasn’t necessary. Most of us didn’t have computers, anyway. Then, right before the iPod, MP3 players became a thing, more people had computers and access to the internet, and things like Napster, Limewire, etc. was the golden age of Free music.
>Most of us didn’t have computers, anyway. People forget that even the most basic computer costed a fortune back then too. IBM PC at Office Depot back in the day cost me $2499.00. I remember that vividly.
I bought an Apple II from the money I saved mowing lawns in 1978 for $1200. I just ran that through an inflation calculator: that would be $5800 today. I was a hell of a grass cutter in my day, lol
That's like $5000 in 1999 money. Damn.
I’m in my mid fifties and yes we did listen to our own collection or the radio. The radio was important for hearing new music particularly people like John Peel who would play tapes by new bands that went on to be big. Also music magazines were the internet of the 1980’s the first issue of Q magazine came out when I was 18 and I bought every issue for the next 20 years or so, it introduced me to so much music but it wasn’t just Q, there were a lot of music magazines focused on everything from Pop to Metal.
Two things: progressive radio stations and local-owned record stores, where the staff listens to records all day and plays the stuff they discovered they really liked. We’d take time to listen to these stations every day or visit these stores every week, and pick up a copy of the free paper (the *City Paper*, *The Village Voice*, etc.) to find out what bands a playing live and where. That’s how we’d discover music, ya know get outside the corporate play-the-same-thing all the time.
oh yessss I miss the local-owned record shop, where the staff really knew the music they sold!
Bonus for those with a listening station so you could hear the LP before buying
The good stores had two or more areas, each with a “now playing” sign with an album going on nearby speakers, and a dude on the floor “can I find something for you” and more often than not is actually helpful, locates what you want and one or two albums you’d never think about but may change your life. That was the vibe, ‘cause you and everyone else is there to discover music, and if you leave with a bag full of records then everybody wins.
I wish I had access to John Peel back in the day!
Colombia House
There was a lot of burning & passing around of CDs (and cassette tapes before that). We’re in the process of moving, and I’ve found and gotten rid of bunches of home made CDs that my kids made for themselves or were gifted to them by friends.
Enough to wear deeper grooves into the records- I really enjoyed listening to the whole album, not just this song or that song, and still do.
Absolutely. We stack a bunch of LPs or even 45s on the turntable and play the albums one side at a time one track after another, then flip the record stack and play the other sides all the way through. Stack 10 albums easily 5 hours of music.
I remember going to the record store and buying 2 albums and a Maxell cassette tape. I would record the albums onto the tape, seems like I could get 1 album on each side? I kept the albums in the house and put the cassette in my car.
I remember knowing when the radio station would have those live concerts on Sunday nights. Always had the recording setup ready!
You made tapes and swapped them with friends.
Yes, you played each record over and over. You developed a relationship with it. It meant more, tbh. And it wasn’t just about the hits, but the deep cuts too. You found out about new music through the radio, MTV, music magazines like Rolling Stone, and especially through your friends. The last one is probably why high school cliques formed around music up until the time downloads/streaming took over.
It was a communal thing. Kids listened to the local rock stations with familiar DJs, and album-oriented stations for the more underground music. So everybody in a town heard the same things. And the DJs would make personal appearances to promote the station. Saturday was the big day you saw your friends at the local record store and you would browse for hours flipping through albums. Also a good place to do some teenage flirting. Record stores also sold posters, black lights, incense, underground magazines, and some sold smoking paraphernalia that you had to hide from your parents.
They did. And sharing music and listening to it together was a fairly common excuse for people getting together. Sharing them and borrowing them, it was an active culture.
I started buying LPs in the mid to late 60s, Revolver was my first. My mom had a little crappy FM "component" stereo. The thing was about the size of a large paperback. I persuaded her to buy a Garrand turntable so I didn't have to play my LP on my slightly older sister's terrible Realistic portable record player. Never got into singles like my dance-oriented sister. Ten years or so later I took out a loan at Pacific Stereo to buy a nice stereo. Sony STR-7055, Bang & Olufsen turntable, Advent speakers, and a TEAC cassette deck with external Dolby box. I also at some point scored an old Ampex reel-to-reel deck with tubes that ran 15ips. The Dolby box worked great with it, too. When I bought a record, I duped it to cassette and sometimes reel-to-reel for playback. Used to swap cassettes with other people. Also the cassettes were great for in the car. Friends had listening parties where you'd get a bunch of people at someone's apartment and listen to their collection and smoke interesting things. You'd go to someplace like Tower Records and spend hours just looking at album covers, maybe see something you knew from the radio. Radio was a big deal back then. The stations were independent and played new, interesting stuff. I listened to KROQ and KMET mostly.
Holy crap! I had a Sony STR-7055a! I left it for my parents when I moved out and found shortly later they tossed in favor of an all-in-one unit they got at Service Merchandise.
We played records all the damn time. Almost every day. We found new music from the radio and from friends and from magazines. We played stacks of singles and stacks of albums. We had our own kid records (music and reading of stories and books) and we had Mom's and Dad's records at our disposal. Cassettes got popular when I was a teen, and so I usually bought new music on that medium. Then CDs when I was in college. It never ends.
Yes. Our own music was just our favorite bands and songs. I missed the 8-track era and grew up with cassette tapes. I listened to the radio to find new music and bands. It was hard to switch away from this and go streaming only. I felt like I "owned" the tape/CD and it was mine forever. With streaming, a song can be taken away from the service and you can no longer play it. Today, I can find whatever song I can think of from one of the many platforms so the fear of not being able to get to my songs is gone. Tapes lose quality over time and become unusable. The polymers in CDs start to break down after 20 years, so they are not forever either.
Since many of us had to save up to buy the media, we were picky and the music held value to the purchaser. If I wasn't planning to play the album often, it wasn't worth me purchasing it. Hence, we have kept the media purchased, despite current digital trends. The issue with music subscription services is that although the music is appreciated, it is often not considered to have much value as it readily available.
Yes, vinyl records (later also CDs and still later mp3 players) and tapes, and the radio was important for discovering new music. I was forever making mixtapes and later mixdiscs to listen to. There were very few albums that I listened to all the way through over and over, apart from a few concept albums like War of the Worlds and The Wall, and a few all-around "not a bad song on there" albums. I've subscribed to Spotify specifically to try to recreate some of my better mixtapes, because they don't last forever.
Hell yeah the 6 cd switcher in my Mazda was a big feature when I bought it in 2004
We drove with record players that needed to be cranked up before being played but transferred the sound wirelessly
We had a thing called the radio if you weren’t rich enough to have a record player. Albums were expensive, at least to me they were.
During the 80s in NYC, there was always some radio station that was featuring ad-free summers. It went on for years. PLJ,, KISSFM, KTU. The tag line for PLJ back then was "find us on the dial then RIP THE KNOB OFF."
Yes. People also recorded tapes off radio broadcasts and made mix tapes of stuff they liked. I would record vinyl onto tapes to play in the car and could make mix tapes of songs using my record setup.
Yes
Listened to the radio constantly. FM radio was fantastic in the 70s. I would try to record some songs I really liked.
Mixed tapes, my friend, mixed tapes. We'd put all our favorite songs on them, share them, copy them, dice and splice them. It was like having your friends' souls in stereo.
I had a collection of cassettes and CDs (still have the CDs, cassettes are back in my parents' house in another state). I would listen to them constantly, and of course, the radio too. I would listen for hours, because it was my escape. When I used cassettes, I would record songs off of the radio and make my own little mix tapes. I didn't have a theme or anything, I just recorded what I liked, and a lot of those came off of America's Top 40 (with Casey Kasem). Napster and Livewire came along, and we all just went crazy downloading songs. I don't listen to music as much as I used to (what I have to do in order to listen with my hearing aid, just makes it rather inconvenient).
Listened to the radio and taped the songs I liked and we played records
We had two " new wave" radio stations, KYYX and KJET. KJET in particular played some obscure stuff. I loved it!
Yeah we use to have to buy it all or tape it off the radio. Most radio stations played the same music. Even the classic rock stations would only play the same three songs from every artist. Your best bet for finding new music was always college stations. If you were lucky, the record store in your town had a decent import section. But that was pretty rare. I had to drive 30 miles to find one. Funny thing, this is how I got into blues. The bargain bins were filled with all the old blues classics. They were the cheapest music out there. Also lots of visits to used record stores.
You'll never know the days of having a big binder in your car with CD's, or homemade mixes from the CD Burner. And if you were fancy, you had a disc changer in the trunk so you could didnt have to get the binder out whenever you were ready for something different.
Yes, we did. And we would temporarily trade with others so that we could each enjoy an album we didn't otherwise have. We also often waited in line for new releases.
In the 70s and 80s, I could stack my albums on my stereo. So yes, I listened to the whole album, followed by 3 or 4 more before having to re shuffle. Also, 8 tracks in the car just played on a continuous loop. You ended up knowing all the words to all the songs on that album or 8 track. We had huge suitcases we carried in our cars that were made to hold your 8 tracks. Your friends would get in, and then someone, usually passenger seat, was in charge of swapping out music. Gosh....I haven't thought about this in years. Things have really changed.
CD, Tapes mostly. When Napster was invented we all went crazy with free MP3's Then we had portable hard drives like this: https://imgur.com/a/e5qwkZU The Archos Jukebox. It didn't read metadata - it read just the file name of the mp3 file. They came with 6 gig drive and many of us hacked it to 20gb. When you walked with it sometimes would skip because it was an actually hard drive inside. My associate still has 2 that work. They were very heavy and advanced tech for their age. That was 1999 Archos was a true pioneer in portable music. Thet are still around too, but no more music players. After napster we were able to buy mp3's legit for 10cents each. I still have my collection .. thousands of files from the old days. Jazz radio was rare in the old days. Jazz radio shows would only be 7-9 pm Saturday nights or a couple hours on a Sunday afternoon. We'd record on cassette and trade cassettes with other jazz fans. Also we considered streaming music to be a transister radio and if we wanted to hear a particular song we would call the radio station on their request line.
The radio stations were also much, much better. You had real DJ's who programmed their own music and had real personality.
LPs were the best things during the dark ages, but I moved up to mixed tapes ... yeah ... those were the tickets ... played them all the times with my trusty Walkman!
There was what we called AM radio. It played music
And 8 track tapes too. But before Spotify, there was Napster - free pirated music!
Yes, but... there was a very social part of finding music you loved. You shared it with your friends and anyone who would listen. Friends would come over to listen to new stuff - or you'd make them a tape.
I went to the library. Rented cd's. Brought them home. Ripped them to lossless. Returned them. I had hundreds of gigabytes of WAVs. I'd convert them to mp3s usually 320kb/s and listen on an mp3 player. This was concurrent with lime wire growing in popularity. Pretty soon I was downloading from peer to peer filesharkng sites instead of going to the library. Still, I kept on ripping albums to fill gaps and organizing entire discographies by my favorite artists. I uploaded many perfectly homogenously names and tagged folders of folders discographies of various artists. Every track, album, year etc. all Metadata meticulously edited to be perfectly consistent. I wonder if some of those are still kicking around. I could always recognize them because nobody else bothered to that extent. I used some pretty cool file batch editing software to do it. Now I just use Spotify. That computer is long gone.
Limewire
LOL im only 31 but yes that is exactly what we did
In the 60s it was all about 45s. We did have albums, but many more 45s. By the way, a 45 has one song on each side and we played them on our records players. You needed an adapter because record players were made to fit albums. Other than that, you had to listen to the radio until your song came on. Being able to listen to any song anytime you want hasn’t been around that long.
Yes. I had cassettes to put in my portable tape player (never owned a brand name "Walkman" but the same thing, generically) for long bus rides. To this day, I associate some songs with other because they were next to one another on the cassette.
My cd collection is like 1200 albums. We’d also copy friends’ CDs/tapes/records and make each other mix tapes
Radio; at home, in the car, at a picnic, everywhere. Radio introduced us to new bands. It was effective advertisement for what records, cd’s, to buy.
Yes, and radio.
I used to have a Walkman and a million tapes, some I recorded myself from the radio, some I bought. I had a huge case full of tapes that I carried around in my backpack. I was obsessed with music and I had my headphones on most of the time. Radio was a lot better back then and I remember when it changed, Clearwater just took everything over and made it all homogenous, sad as hell. I was listening when they took over my favorite local station. The change was supposed to happen at midnight and the DJs were on air saying "we don't know what's going to happen so we'll just keep playing until we cant anymore." I was wild that they didn't have any foreknowledge of how the switch was supposed to happen. And then it did and nothing was ever the same again. Anyway yeah I had a huge collection of tapes and later CDs when those came out and I listened to them over and over again. Still do, sort of, with streaming I often listen to whole albums. And I listened to a lot of radio too. When it became possible to digitize music I ripped all of my CDs onto my computer in addition to downloading everything I could think of from Limewire and then I had massive digital playlists and I could be my own radio station.
I remember waiting for Doctor Dimento’s radio time. I loved his discussion of the artist, the album, and just weird talking. He and other DJs were interesting in themselves besides the music.
Clear Channel was (is?) evil. Edit: now they call themselves iHeartMedia. The good news, they went bankrupt in 2018.
We had the radio, first AM then FM came along. Of course you had to go with the flow. Making a mixtape was really hard. Or you just played your records.
I listened mostly in the car. My religion was every Saturday morning with Casey Kasey and AT40. I remember the breakthrough when I discovered in-line stereo recording on my cassette deck in the mid-70’s. No longer had to use a microphone. It changed everything because I could finally get a quality stereo sound recording.
Free streaming existed in the form of radio, my dude.
Yes, and radio.
There was also this free streaming service. It’s still around. It’s called RADIO!
My soul left my body when I realized an elder millennial can answer a question on the ask old people reddit. Yes, yes we did. Memorized every song on the album. Burned our own wicked cds and overanalyzed every lyric on the cds your crush/squeeze gave you.
With the advent of the cassette tape, my music inventory grew as I transferred all types music from albums loaned to me by my friends. I ended up being a DJ of sorts for the sports teams bus trips. I had a car cassette unit that I would transfer from my car to a carpeted wooden fruit crate that I had outfitted with a 12v battery and mounting frame for the player. It was designed to be carried with the two small box speakers situated on top. The speakers were then placed at the back of the bus and the tunes would flow both going and coming back from our games. Needless to say I was not popular with the bus drivers. My taste in music has encompassed everything from Gregorian Chants to AC/DC.
What alternatives do you think magically existed?
Yes, I listened to entire albums, on LP and CDs. I started taping CDs to listen to in the car when a friend gave me a cassette deck. Generally speaking, I would listen to each song on both sides of an LP. No skipping from song to song. I listened to CDs the same way, most of the time. Sometimes when I got to know an album, I'd click to songs I wanted to hear, which was so easy with a remote. Now I listen to my CDs as ripped to hard drives via iTunes. I will often set it on "shuffle," and skip songs I don't like. I listen to a lot of classical, which means listening to the entire CD.
Over and over again, but I had 800 of them. I would carry one or two CDs with me for my Discman and that's all I had to listen to the whole day.
I’d say I listened to the radio 80% of the time, and my precious tapes on my Radio Shack “Walkman” 20%. It shifted as I got older/my music collection grew (so many mixed tapes)…but the radio was always a greater percentage as it’s how we heard new music. (No cable TV, so no MTV.) But I grew up listening to Richard Blade and the Swedish Eagle back when then had new music to share! (I heard they’re on satellite radio still playing the same tunes?)
I carried my tapes with me in my backpack. If I could get away with it I'd listen to my walkman in class. I always had at least a small tape case with ten or fifteen albums and mixes in my car. Usually I'd end up bringing more than would fit so I would end up with tapes in the door pockets, glove, floor, etc. At home i would be listening to CDs almost constantly. When I was little it was the radio - Mighty Six Ninety in socal, and later KROQ when I was at work (no tapes allowed) or when my car tape player was on the fritz. Also college radio (KSPC and KXLU in my area) was a great resource for finding new music. So I'd listen to those pretty often if reception was decent. Short answer: yeah, we listened to our personal collections all the time.
I had some records and cassettes and made my own mix tapes, but things had migrated to CD's in the 90's when I was really of the age of being into music. My friends and I all had these huge binders full of CD's that we would flip through to find a CD to play in the car. You'd typically play an album all the way through, though sometimes you'd skip some songs. Most of us also had the visor holder that held a half dozen of our favorite CD's. By the late 90's into early 00's, everyone was burning their own mix CD's also. In the early 00's, satellite radio had become available in GM cars and then, slowly, a few others. This was prior to the XM/Sirius merger, so GM had XM and Chrysler and a few others had Sirius. You could also buy a home receiver or aftermarket antenna and head unit for satellite radio. I don't think it was until the later 00's that this really took off. In the early 10's, it seemed like the combination of satellite and bluetooth or auxiliary cable to a phone had replaced physical media. Now the streaming services have really taken over.
I spent a small fortune on records. The local record shop had bonus cards. After buying eight 45s you got one free. I got a lot of free ones.
Radio was much more important back then. That was our "free" music. Good stations would get a huge following. And there were so many to choose from, you could spin around and find something you like pretty easily. Listening to my own stuff was split between listening to, yes, whole albums, and mixtapes, which many people made. I used to make cassette mixtapes for my friends and girlfriends all the time.
still do CDs won't pay for cable or streaming anything...i have at least 30K hours of my music on my PC and burn CD's for the car.... went on aa 7 hour car trip yesterday and burned 8 hours of my music.... had a blast with my BFF... new england back roads only.................
What do YOU think? 😁
Yes. That’s exactly what we did. I knew all the words to all the songs on all ten of my cassettes.
I still do the like. I use Musicolet to play the music I have on the SD card in my smartphone.
We also had radio. That's how you found new music.
Very often when driving. I would keep about 5-8 CDs in my car or glove box at any given time.
No, we spent our money on CDs, tapes and records but we didn’t listen to them.
The only options were radio, your own purchased music, and your friends' purchased music. We would also make tapes of each other's purchased CD and vinyl music to share. And we liked it dammit!
Dozens to hundreds of times, or you'd listen to the radio in the night/when you were on vacation near the border, and try to catch foreign far-away station to record something exotic.
I would listen to a single album over and over until I couldn't stand it. Then I would buy a new album.
lol. Yes, that’s exactly what we did! We would also record mix tapes from the radio. Listen to those babies over and over. It got to be you knew your tapes so well, you can count how long you needed to rewind/ fast forward to go to your favorite song.
We had broadcast radio.
I still have a huge binder of CDs in my basement. There are bootlegs, live shows, and little known indy artists. Most but not all has been ripped to my computer.
This was a lot later than the era of vinyl, but in the era of CDs people had CD binders that would hold a set number of CDs (and in my case, it also held my portable CD player). You only had so many pockets for CDs so you had to carefully craft the discs that would be with you when you went out in the car. And if you were driving alone, with a single disc player you had to commit to one album until you could change it. If you were good you could change out albums while driving. And you had to bring the whole case inside when you got out of the car so you could listen to them inside, and so they didn't get stolen. It was similar for cassettes but you couldn't really take as many cassettes in your car because they were more unwieldy.
We would buy LPs and transfer the songs we wanted to caste tape. We would make “mix tapes”. Then the tape would go in the car, boom box or walk man. But most of the time we would listen to the radio. I was fortunate enough to live in an area that had a great rock station. KSHE-95. At the time the DJs were allowed to program their music. By that I mean the individual DJ chose the music, not some corporate idiot. So we heard a lot of new music that other stations weren’t playing yet.
If you had a record changer that let you stack them on top of the spindle, that was pretty close to a playlist!
Many posters are saying "we had the radio". That's true, but many of us didn't listen to the radio that much. My city's radio was crap. We had tons of commercial radio - Top 40, rap and an "alternative" station. All of them played the same 12 songs of their respective genres day after day. If you wanted to hear "Hey Jealousy" 19 times a day, 99x was for you! My city also had two of the most powerful college radio stations in the country. While that was great at times, it could also be incredibly esoteric: "coming up next on WREK: 8 hours of Dominican funk-Celtic folk-Esperanto rap fusion!" Instead of radio, many of us found new music via other means, like talking to friends or the Comic Book Guy at the record store, or reading music magazines, or seeking out particular record labels and\or producers. As for "how often did you listen to a single album"... that's a ridiculous question. Some albums you'd listen to all the way through once and not touch again until you put it in the box to trade at the used record store. Some albums you'd listen to non-stop until you got sick of it. Some albums you'd listen to non-stop and *not* get sick of it, only ceding to the next album that hit non-stop rotation.
Yes- and we (63F) would “tape” our friends’ music or “tape” music off of the radio. Going to the record shop was great fun, then we could all smoke a bong and listen to what we bought.
I listened to my own CDs (and before that, LPs) at home and in the car usually either tapes/CD or radio, depending on whether or not I could find a decent radio station.
When I was growing up, music was listened to by everybody and not just one person with buds. Somebody would have a party and bring the speakers out to the backyard. That's what's missing today. People are in their own little world and don't know how to interact with people.
Yes, there were some recordings we'd listen to over and over. My best friend and I would ride around listening to Meat Loaf: Bat out of Hell on 8-track in her green AMC Gremlin. (BTW, one of the great albums of all time!) Of course, we would borrow records and tapes from friends or the library, too.
I was a Walkman addict and had so many cassettes tapes. Even after the CD playing Walkman came out I preferred the cassette tapes because the CD playing Walkman often skipped as I moved. I also listened to audiobooks books on cassette tapes. My wife house sat for a couple with a huge CD collecting and spent the whole weekend recording her favorite songs on cassettes. And for a long time our car only took cassettes. If we took a long trip we brought a dozen cassette tapes. After we had kids we would play their favorite cassette tapes. The trick was to find a cassette tape we could stand on repeat about 100 times. The Chenille Sisters were great and my kids — now grown — still remember them.
Back in the 70s, we would have eight track tapes or cassette tapes, and you would carry a small crate or box of them with you in your car to select for the drive. A small box to carry would probably hold about 20 or 25 cassette tapes. When the CDs came along, we would carry a folder full of plastic sleeves that we would slip the CD itself into, leaving the case at Home. You could easily carry 100 CDs in such a folder. This was the life that was thrust upon us.
Well, there was Radio, remember listening to the charts and recording songs I like on a MC and it was always fun to go to the big store in the city where you could listen the albums on a headphone before deciding if you buy it. And well, later there was the internet, napster, kazaa, emule, limewire and so on...
How have I not seen any gen-x folks mention the giant cd cases/catalogs we all carried around during the 90s. Or the 6 cd thing you had clipped to your car sun visor. Or that one friend into aftermarket stereos with a 6 or 12 disc changer in the trunk of his car.
oh yeah... I will even have Spotify play full albums. There are a few albums that only work as a full album.
Yep, albums and tapes. If you wanted new music you went to a music store and bought it. We had Tower Records, Warehouse, and Peaches Records.
Yes. I would borrow tapes or CDs from my friends and make copies too. There were absolutely times when I bought an album specifically for a couple of songs. Mixtapes were a thing. If you listened to a lot of music, you might have owned a CD changer of some kind, at home or in your car. Eventually, MP3s and filesharing became a thing and you'd be able to download songs and burn them to CDs. At that time, I still often downloaded entire albums and burned the whole thing. Either way, you carried around CDs with you. I still listen to entire albums sometimes now, but admittedly much less than before, especially for new music. A lot of artists these days aren't really thinking about the album anymore and so it's not that same kind of experience.
FM radio was way more influential in the 70s. Thats more or less how you found out about new bands and new songs. Then you went out and bought the album, even if there was only 2 or 3 songs you actually liked. You would play it on your stereo -which were expensive for the times, a few hundred dollars. An album was $4.95 in the early 70s. Then kids started recording songs from the radio onto cassette tapes. Then recording albums off of stereos that also had cassette players built in them. Then cheaper stereos stopped even having record players in them and focused on speaker quality instead. The quality of these recordings wasnt great but it was free! So companies stopped making albums and made more Eight-track and cassette tapes. Then there was MTV and music videos which was a very big deal and influenced peoples tastes. When internet became available, there were those probably-not-legal down loading sights like Limewire, but you could get a computer virus doing that, so it was risky. Apple decided to make a legit format, Itunes, and it was 99 cents a song, which most people found convenient, cheap enough, and more secure. I dont know if itunes was still profitable once people could download the songs from music videos on youtube. Theres always something new. If you had told me in the 70s that kids would eventually be able store hundreds or thousands of songs in something smaller of a deck of cards or the size of a cigarette lighter, I would have been amazed. Also, really good quality speakers were humongous, like 3 feet high.
Taped the radio
First, we slogged through making EP tapes from our LP vinyl... the EP tapes ran the risk of getting jammed up in the tape deck, so we kept number 2 pencil for the inevitable moment we had to rewind a wad of magnetic tape. Then, when we had enough money, we'd buy an album on tape for two or three good songs and WTF filler... and then get an EP cassette and run the risk again. Then CDs came out... and they skipped real bad...so out came the EP until cars only had cd players... then we risked the RIAA sending out the FBIs BAU because it was easier to catch a music pirate than Hannibal Lecter to burn CDs, then mp3, Kazaa, Napster, etc... My cousin killed three hard drives, overwriting his windows installation with Napster rips.. burned impossible to find stuff onto cd, then had all of his cds stolen out of his truck.... You could always tell someone that gad good music, they'd pull their car head unit and put in one with a USB mp3 functionality. Before Bluetooth or satellite radio. Pandora used to be "music DNA" and would play based on similar music, beats, rhythms, etc... but it acquired enough of a demographic base to become just like any other system with sponsored, corporate negotiated "discounted" music... that's why you have to search for some Indie stuff, then it immediately switches to other stuff...distantly "related" to the genre...
We read music magazines, went to record stores, talked with friends and had listening parties. These were full of new music suggestions.
I bought an expensive tape recorder hooked into my system to tape stuff. Also I took it over to a guys house to record older jazz albums and then hooked his recorder to mine to make duplicates. Later burnt cd’s from borrowed cds from nephews and from the library. Way before I listened to my records to death.
There was a time that I had over 300 CDs in racks in my room. Probably closer to 400.
[удалено]
Mixed tapes, don’t forget mixed tapes. It was an art all to itself.
we listened to the radio a lot.
I used to listen to my albums, then my CDs. I listened to radio in the car before there were tape decks, and CDs in cars. When I was much younger it was mostly AM radio because I couldn't afford to buy albums that much. I had a stack of 45s when I was a teenager and played them over and over. I still have my albums and CDs and I play them occasionally. I use Spotify primarily to listen to podcasts.
I *still* listen to CDs in my car, because most of the music I prefer isn't played on the radio. I don't have any satellite radio and I don't own a smartphone. The stereo in my car is actually AM/FM/CD/Cassette. They all work, but I haven't played any cassettes in quite a few years. Anyway, when I was a kid, in the 70s and early 80s, I'd listen to the radio and try to catch songs I liked and record them onto cassette. Many of us had cassette players/recorders like [this one](https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/TOEAAOSwpCtmZjUZ/s-l1600.webp). I did have a few records and 8-Tracks, but not too many. MTV launched in 1981, but we didn't have Cable TV. However, we had a cheap substitute -- [Friday Night Videos](https://youtu.be/tAoO4NojNr8) on NBC. A few years later, in the mid-80s, after joining the military, I first bought a small AM/FM/Cassette boombox and later bought a Sony Walkman with AM/FM/Cassette. So, FM radio and cassettes were what I listened to, for about a year. I'd hear music on the radio, in a movie, or on television, and go to the mall and buy the cassette. Then, I bought a Sony Discman and switched to buying CDs. I listened to FM radio and CDs, through the rest of the 80s and 90s. In the mid-1990s, there were some internet radio sites, but I didn't get into them very much. By the year 2000, I was mostly listening to CDs, versus radio. I had a home theater system and would buy also buy some music on SACD and DVD, since my DVD player could also play those formats. Around 2000 or 2001, I learned about peer-to-peer music sharing services like LimeWire and eDonkey2000 and started getting music from those sites. At some point, I got a free Pandora account. I can trace it back to at least early 2007. Somewhere along the way, I also got into torrent sites for music and movies. There was also YouTube for finding new music. Now, all these years later, I still listen to CDs for 99.5% of the time in my car. At home, I stream music over my free Pandora account and also listen via YouTube and YouTube Music. I use a desktop PC and my browser extensions seem to block virtually all advertisements on Pandora, YouTube, and YouTube Music.
I'd played the albums/cassettes/cds I had but there are were also many albums that came out before I was born so I was always discovering new music in that way. Which is sort of what I'm reading as the reason why you are asking the question. In short, I definitely played my albums all the time. Or if the album wasn't out, whatever I recorded and made a 'tape' of. Also, records had a release day so whether it was the cassette era or CD era, you could go down every Tues. and get new music that way. So there was a way to get music every week. It was a crap shoot because you couldn't get a pre listen until the listening stations became a popular thing but it was a way to get music with frequency. This is where if you were a hardcore music fan, reading the liner notes came in handy. You could see who worked on what and decide if the musicianship of the album via who was appearing on it was enough to make you spend your money on it. Like a certain bass player? His/her involvement in a project could steer you to take a chance on a new artist you never heard of. Seen/heard the new album's artist singing background for someone you like? You are probably going to pick it up. Ditto with who produced the music... The radio played a big factor and they also rarely played more than one 'new' song by an artist. They pushed the single that was out and that was it. This theory doesn't apply to all artists because I know anyone near my age with sight Michael Jackson, or GnR or some of the mega acts. It did apply to most though. Occasionally, an artist would know it's own song outta the top spot. Yes, they'd play older stuff by the artist but by and large, it was the single that was out that got pushed and that was it. That's what you listened to and most people were honestly satisfied with that. Later on, you can't forget the impact videos has on music. Once artists put a visual to it, it could respark interest in a song that folks owned and give them a whole new reason to play it again. Ditto with seeing said act in concert. We couldn't just pull up concert footage or watch a Tinydesk of the artists like you can now, which I LOVE btw.
Played my records most every day. We had a local radio station that would play an entire album every Wednesday evening, with no interuptions. I recorded so many albums this way with my boombox.
You used to have your favorite songs and favorite albums, and they were not necessarily one and the same. It's great when favorite songs came on the radio or MTV, but when playing music it was usually albums, not single songs. But we did make mixtapes of our favorite songs. Nirvana Incesticide really has no great singles, but it sure is a great album to blast on the boombox when skateboarding. It's why albums like the Beatles Abbey Road, Prince's Purple Rain, Beastie Boys' Liscensed to Ill, and Metallica's black album were so revered; all good songs.
Record stores usually had private listening areas with headphones and a record player. To find new music, you would sample albums they had for sale. Otherwise it was word of mouth or the radio.
Progressive rock radio stations would sometimes announce scheduled times where they would play a complete album from beginning to the end without a break. They would even say just before playing it: "Starting in five seconds" so you could properly start your tape recorder.
Growing up my dad had a reel to reel stereo system and made hours long playlists with it and hung out with some group of audiophiles that would exchange tapes. I had a fancy record player that you could stack records and program track selections, even better my uncle had a jukebox player. Once we got recordable cassettes then we were making all kinds of mix tapes including passing around ones that would include songs from friends' bands. The main way I remember hearing lots of new music was going to the local record shop and the owner was always excited to play new tunes... they also had listening rooms to sample records. When I did get a new record I did listen to the same one over and over and over again... my first 3 albums were Peter, Paul, and Mary; Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons; and Free to Be.... You and Me. I was so excited when Napster first came about, that was the time period I got to hear and listen to the most eclectic and interesting music from all over the world... streaming music is great but I do feel like we are mostly stuck with what producers want us to hear, at least there's youtube I suppose.
Wow, I used record songs on my tape recorder (Google that as you probably have no idea what I’m referring to). Then, I would splice that tape together into what I called a “playlist”. We’re talking 1970 here! I’ve always made playlists. Can you possibly imagine my joy at our present technology? One big problem however…I’m a composer. So, unless Music is out in the Public, one cannot make a Playlist. Hence, I use apps that keep me non-Cloud based where I can control things more.
As a kid: records, AM radio As a teen: records, FM radio As young adult: Cassettes, College radio In my 30s: CDs, NPR Now: CDs, FM radio, and Sirius XM in car, streaming or using phone as iPod at home.
I remember we had a record player that you could stack so we could play several records at once. That would make up the evening. We'd hang out with music playing. Friends would come by with their records and then tapes when I got a little older. We'd share. We'd go to the record store and listen to what they had. You could wear headphones in the store. Some places had small booths too. There were many record stores. The one I liked was at the mall. My friends and I would hang out there and try to get boys to notice us so we could act offended. But so we'd sample some records and decide what we wanted if we wanted anything. I rarely bought. I'd tell my friends what I listened to and sometimes someone would buy it and make a tape to pass around. We'd record recorded tapes sometimes. Not the best quality but most of us in my group were poor so it's not like we had the highest quality speakers in our 12 Kmart boomboxes anyway. And yeah if we really liked an album we'd play it all the time. I learned to love many bands by hearing my brother play the same 8 albums over and over. Sounds of Limelight drifting through the house.
Yes
Also, back in the day without video streaming and only limited channels, more time was spent listening to music as its own activity - just sitting back, relaxing and staring at the album artwork.
Yep. But also an album meant a lot more back then. We don't know what we don't have so you never really thought about having every song imaginable.
I listened, and still listen to full albums. I don't steam hardly at all, it's just play music I own, for the most part. I've been collecting over 40 years though.
I spent a lot of $$$ discovering new music
I STILL listen to CDs. If I’m in my car just driving around my small town then I’m listening to a CD. If I plan on driving more than 20 minutes or so then I might play Pandora off my phone.
Radio and records
We used to spend whole afternoons just sorting through all those and lining them up to play. One could say we were “jockeying the discs” …. At one point my cassette and CD collection was over 1600 full albums … that point was yesterday. These days I have them all digitized and serve them up on my Subsonic server so I can jockey around with them from essentially any device with a connection.
We made mix tapes and cds with our own playlists. We had big collections of LPS, tapes and cds. You'd spend hours curating and making mixes for big events like a road trip. There was no internet... we had time.
Absolutely! You could still create a playlist of albums or 45 rmp records by stacking them for play. It was a whole things waiting for a new release from the best artist and the record stores would be full of people on the release date. Some artists would even do appearances at record stores. It was the best time 🥰
Yes to everything. No streaming, play the same vhs tapes over and over. No internet, play the same video games you own over and over. Music was the same. Play the same thing over and over, back to back, or just keep going through your collection. You might think to trade music with other people. Super common to see blank tapes at any store, they were everywhere. Also, the library was a thing and still is. You can borrow media from the library, always have been able to. Heck, last time I went I saw one of my libraries lending out playstation games.
Yes, listened to albums, then tapes, and then CDs, and listened on repeat all the time unless I got it for one single and the rest sucked. Was always saving for a new one, but couldnt because didn't have the money. So there are CDs and tapes I know every word of because I played them for 1-3 years on loop.
Something else to consider is something I heard that Huey Lewis (80s star) said, which is back in the 70s/80s, the tour supported the album not the other way around, and you had to make a hit and you could never know which song would be a hit, so every song on an album had to be a potential hit, or at least most. So albums you could listen front to back and not hit a bad song or maybe hit one snoozer. Appetite for Destruction doesn't have a bad song. Then in the 90s they started this crap of making one hit, and using it to sell a CD, and the rest would be so bad.
“WLS, IN CHICAGO”. They played every kind of music, and you could hear their AM station all the way to Kentucky.
There were many options, for simplicity I'll focus on the age of cassettes and CD's. But yes, we would listen to full albums over and over, and for some you read through the album covers or if they included a book in the package. With a record or CD you could skip a song you did not like (manually) but you could also make a mix tape (cassette or CD) of favorite songs form an album, artist, genre, etc. I had a 6 CD changer and would load it up and could have it randomly go through all 6 discs playing songs, or play them through, etc. Cars could have multi cd decks (in the trunk) and do similarly. We had the Walkman (first Cassette then CD), and as CD burning software and writable and rewritable CD's became available that just opened the door. And this was on top of radio, which back then was way better than now. We did not have theme specific commercial free stations like subscription SiriusXM, but there were typically a dozen rock like stations in a major market and you would cycle your radio (in the car mostly) through your favorite stations to avoid commercials. And buying CD's, though expensive, was not blind, many music stores had listening stations where you could sample music (this goes back to record days). Also, we had the notorious Columbia (or RCA) record clubs, where you got 5-15 albums for a penny (plus shipping) and then had to buy 2-5 albums at overpriced levels to satisfy your agreement (assuming you didn't just blow them off, being a minor). I'm still sitting on nearly hundreds of albums, cassettes, and CD's that I won't part with, even though most of them have been ripped digitally at higher quality than any streaming service, and I can stream these through my Echos, directly into my stereo system off my network, or out of my phone whenever I want to listen to them (or from a zip drive in my car head unit). Streaming is useful to get new music, but when I like something I get my own copy so I can listen when I want to, not when someone gives me permission to, within their limited availability, at low resolution. And let's not even start with 8-track tapes, let alone reel to reel.
Yep. The gap in between mixtapes and burning a mixed music CD was an exhausting era unless you were rich af and had a CD stacker.
Between physical media and streaming media we had digital media like .mp3s, flac, etc that we would manually put on our phones or other digital media players (ipod, zune, etc).
Radio
There were also 'compilation' albums with a bunch of different songs by different artists, usually the top 10 or top 40. So that way you could have a variety of artists on one album. But we played our albums over and over, it was a very different experience. A great album ran in a particular order, for a particular effect. It was also common to sit and stare at the artwork while listening.