I confess I wasn't sure they were still going, but it seems Apple is discontinuing them. I'm of the age where I've segued through albums on cassette from Woolies1 and top 40 singles2 (what wasn't worthy of purchase with the limited funds available would be obtained by spending Sunday evenings with fingers poised over the record-play-pause buttons) to flipping through vinyl in Selectadisc3 to getting my first CDs5. Bootlegs and concert recordings would still be got from the market on cassette. Home taping was killing music, though judging by the content of my sister's Smash Hits, not nearly fast enough. Law had it that the purchase of any CD player had to come with either REM's Automatic for the People or Dire Straits Brothers in Arms, it was a rite of passage. As was being too cool to play either.
We had Walkmans (sexist, I know) that used to be the size of suitcases and then, in mere years, were smaller than the cassette itself, leaving its plastic arse hanging out to CD Walkmen and folios of CDs to take on trips6. Life was measured in boxes of cassettes and CDs and courtship was established through the mutual exchange of mixtapes. Only by the suitable exchange of music could the likelihood of further exchanges of bodily fluids become more probable. An unworthy selection (say Rock Me Amadeus) was that era's instant swipe left. There were minidiscs, but no one, not even the six people who adopted the format talked about them.
The iPod was revelatory. I think I splurged on the third-gen version with a capacious hard disk that swallowed my music collection whole after only two entire weeks ripping it to MP3 with a tool that made iTunes seem like the Best Software Ever Written. With a swirl of the wheel, every song I ever owned. I think more latterly I got an iPad touch and then came the phones and the great slaughter of the devices. I just dug out of the drawer of technological archaeology and they both, with a bit of juice (and a firewire cable for the first), still work. One day, thousands of years in the future, when aliens come to Earth to ponder the demise of humanity, they will find these devices and entire fields of research will be formed around the social relevance of our music collections. Who was this Amadeus and why did he feel the need to rock people?
Of course, now we've gone further, and everything is streamed (leastways in the Asbestos Palace) and the masses of CDs are banished to the garage and bags of cassettes and mixtape frustrations and battleship-heavy boxes of vinyl to the loft.
1a famous shop, where once-upon-a-time children learned to shoplift pick n mix or spend their paper round money on such top 40 classics as Rock Me Amadeus.
2small plastic disk containing two songs, to be cool you always had to tell everyone the b-side was best. It rarely was.
3a record shop 'down Nottingham' - most towns had them, filled with acres of browsable records, and – as a boy – you'd always end up buying something you didn't really want in an effort to impress a girl4 with your ineffable cool.
4she wouldn't be impressed and you'd end up with another compilation of b-sides.
5now primarily used to scare birds and bemuse children.
6you'd take fifty, and always not have the one you wanted to listen to.