How technology has changed the way we experience music
Life as a music-crazy teenager growing up in Allahabad was not fair on Sam Lal. There were too many albums to buy and too little money. But he found a way. He used up his tuition allowance to get his hands on that Elton John cassette he had waited months for or the Carlos Santana tape that his collection simply had to have. “Once I realised that I could get away with it and get all the music I wanted, I carried on for months before I was finally caught,” he says with a smile. Lal is now 33, editor of a music magazine, and owns a 30 GB video pod that has about 3,000 songs in it. As a music lover, he has seen his music collection shrink from a box of tapes to a rack of slim CDs to a pulsing electronic ticker on an iPod. Lal still visits a music store every few weeks to buy CDs of older albums or those of new Indian bands. He has not thrown away his tapes, they are preserved in old trunks. He owns another1,000 CDs and about 150 LPs.

In the swiftly morphing world of music technology, he is in danger of becoming—like the cassette, the CD, and maybe in some years, the iPod—an anachronism. Graphics designer Nitin Pasricha would definitely think so. It has been eight years since the 25-year-old Delhi resident bought a CD. Yet his music collection includes over 23,000 songs by over 320 artists. The songs take up very little physical space; they rest in a hard disk drive and find their way into his 8 GB music phone. He does not own a CD player and prefers to connect his computer to his home theatre system when he wants to amplify his favourite songs. “It’s not easy to manage so much music on CDs. It can get cumbersome if I want to hear a playlist of assorted tracks. If I had to change CDs for every song, I’d go crazy,” he says. Akshay Vij, 26, a pilot, too remembers the time he wore out his tape of Michael Jackson’s HIStory by rewinding and playing They don’t care about us over and over again. All he has to do now is loop a song on his laptop.

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