With the weakened world economy, content in general faces plenty of gloom and doom. Advertising models are severely weakened. But, oddly, in the world of music, there are some positive signs that the shift to decentralized, online distribution might actually be going well — and maybe economic pressures are simply ensuring the parties involved find some way to make the adjustment.

And music distribution is becoming wonderfully weird and diverse – maybe far more so than in recording’s so-called golden age, an era in the past dominated by racial division, predatory labels, and a few dominant big businesses. (Money is tough as always, but it does make you wonder why we complain so.)

July 1, 1979: it was thirty years ago today that the Sony Walkman went on sale, launching mobile music for the first time.

Wait – rewind (so to speak). That honor really belongs to the portable transistor radio – and, indeed, part of the reason America already knew and loved Sony by the time 1979 rolled around, having embraced their pocketable radios as early as the 1950s. In fact, if you want to blame a device for degrading audio fidelity, you should again look not to MP3s and iPods but back to — you guessed it — the same transistor radio.

But no matter. The Walkman did popularize carrying your own music collection with you. It was not only about mobility, but mobile music collections free of airwaves, mix tapes and the experience of walking around the city or doing a workout with your own personally-assembled soundtrack. It turned everyone into DJs and made the music something that could easily bounce around inside your head rather than around your living room or a music venue. The Walkman and not the iPod might also have to carry the burden of claims that music was made antisocial – but it also made for a uniquely personal experience.

And do we ever love cassettes, with their ability to accommodate our own mixes and recordings and stack in neat cubes.

True, the link that’s making the rounds on the Web parodies the clueless 13-year-old child of the iPod age:
Giving up my iPod for a Walkman [BBC News]

This comes from a different planet than the one on which we live on CDM. In this world, snarky 13-year-olds have no idea what the metal/normal switch does, and the zinger is “Did my dad, Alan, really ever think this was a credible piece of technology?” Okay, you snot-nosed brat, it’s a good thing global warming will revert us all to a primitive Stone Age existence and you won’t have to suffer the fate of technological advancement. PS – your dad says never to call him Alan again. (I kid, kid, really. Just can’t resist.)

Of course, on our planet some 13-year-old is probably assembling his or her own cassette player out of spare parts and turning it into a circuit-bent DJ machine, and knows the entire history of the Sony Walkman by model number, and can tell you which factory assembled your old broken model based on the serial number. In that demented spirit, I invite readers to share your own Walkman memories, and offer up a selection of my favorite cassette-themed posts from CDM (of which, I was surprised to discover, there are quite a lot).

I won’t even try to summarize the history of the Walkman, because I have no idea what it is, and Wikipedia has beaten me to the punch.

The middle child of audio technology, neither as hip as vinyl or as modern as the MP3, the cassette lives on in a massive online shrine called the C-90 Project. Odds are, if you’ve ever seen a blank cassette, it’s stored in here or soon will be. We saw its colorful compact novelties back in 2005. Now, the site has grown and added features, including bi-lingual discussions in both English and Russian, plus organization by format (compact cassette, the standard size, as well as microcassette and minicassette) and brand. If you want to add to this collection, they welcome participants. History will thank you.

A couple of the odder selections here. Weirdly, I remember seeing both back in their day. (Hey, I guess TDK decided to add some Latino flair to their tape line.)

Project C-90. An Ultimate Audiotape Guide. (indeed … it’s even bigger than you think)

This is a profound comment on so many levels. I’ll let it speak for itself:

Yes, you can contact with me. But, if you would want that I played on your party on cassettes, then I refuse. I do not play on cassettes any more. In general, I don’t want play in the club, because people come there to drink and to search partner for copulate. This is bad.

- Artjom, Russian DJ and alternative interface researcher, commenting on Homemade Cassette Tape DJ Mixers + Max/MSP PC

We feel you, Artjom. T-shirt designs will be accepted.

Editorial note: One of the problems with the Internet is that you can’t detect tone. So let me be clear, any would-be kill-joys: I like this quote because it, haiku-like, sums up the world of music. And it mentions cassettes. What’s not to love? Jeez.

Eliot Van Buskirk of Wired points out that RIAA numbers show that records are on the rise again, after two years of declining sales. No, I’m not just using the old-fashioned term "records" to refer to something else — I mean records, as in vinyl, as in big round things with grooves that you put on phonographs. $22.9 million worth of retail value moved in records in the US alone — not a huge industry, necessarily, but nothing to be sneezed at, either. By the way, even though the CD industry is shrinking fast, $7.5 billion of CD albums were sold in 2007. So the record industry has every right to be scared by rapidly-depleting sales — and every opportunity to be intrigued by the money that might be made on digital (which, totaling all different formats, was well over $2 billion).

In fact, here’s one for you: online digital growth outpaces CD shrinkage by a factor of greater than 2:1. It’s tough to project rates forward, but that should be a good sign.

RIAA Admits Vinyl Sales Are Climbing [ Wired.com Listening Post ]

I think the vinyl anomaly, though, is brilliant for a whole number of reasons. What you read in the press about the music biz is pretty one-dimensional. We’re expected to believe the industry is collapsing, and sales are down. The reality is much more complicated. Here are some other factoids you can extract from the RIAA’s 2007 sales figures in the news of the weird category:

• High-def audio formats have completely failed — so much that cassette sales are equivalent to units of SACDs and DVD Audio combined.
• More money was spent on mobile downloads than single downloads elsewhere — thanks to the fact that they’re so ridiculously expensive, of course.
• People spent nearly as much on vinyl records in 2007 as they did on music videos online ($28.2 million).

So, here’s to the cassette and the vinyl record. And what does all this really demonstrate? To me, it’s a blunt reminder that what the record industry has failed to do is successfully transition to new media and new, more diverse audiences. When cassette sales started to deteriorate with the introduction of the CD, no one said the industry was doomed then. Vinyl was a great format, which is why it’s still alive. The online formula is starting to come together, but it’s just not quite there yet. And given that most of the industry’s money still comes from CDs, it seems like it’s likewise time to figure out how to get more mileage out of that format and slow the decline, rather than obsess over it, while continuing to work on new formats.

Photo: Michelle’s House of Disco.