The 00s Part 5: Technology

Let’s make a list of all the things we did not have on January 1, 2000…ready?...iTunes, iPods, iPhones…YouTube, Facebook, Twitter…Snapchat, Spotify, smartphones…

There was no Netflix (at least as we know it now)…no MySpace…no Instagram

Well, what didwe have?...dial-up modems…Windows 98 (if you were lucky) or Windows 95 (if you weren’t)…Apple?...still mostly a corporate basket case…even Google was less than 18 months old…

If we look at music, we were mad for compact discs…they were selling by the hundreds of millions, ensuring that the music industry was drowning in money…

Vinyl?....dead, dead, dead…the only thing that was keeping that format on life support were club djs who still preferred the feel and action of records over CDs in the booth…

We had MP3s and we’d begun to trade music files online, but that was still a clunky and frustrating experience for most people—unless you’d discovered this new thing called “Napster” that had been out for about six months…

Now fast-forward ten years to December 31, 2009…everyone was getting smartphones…global CD sales had dropped from a high of 26 billion U.S. dollars in 2000 to around 9 billion in 2009 with no end in sight…the number would get much smaller yet…

Meanwhile, vinyl was starting to come back…everyone was using digital music files…streaming music services were starting to catch on…and Apple and Google and Facebook were among the most powerful companies in the world…

The recorded music industry was in complete disarray, bleeding money, laying people off, dropping artists, and still trying to litigate their way back to their former glory…

The first decade of the 21stcentury was an era of massive technological disruption…how did our music adapt?...let’s examine that…this is the oughts, part 5…

 

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