The History of Portable Music - Part 2

Ongoing History of New Music

Curiouscast

Music History, History, Music, Music Interviews, Music Commentary

4.8 • 604 Ratings

🗓️ 27 May 2026

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

One of the many great things about music is that we can enjoy it anywhere…I’m talking about the recorded kind…everyone has a smartphone, and every smartphone has the capability of playing music, whether you’re listening to tracks stored in its memory or streaming something from a service like Spotify or apple music…as long as your device has juice, you can enjoy listening to music anywhere you are… Take this program, for example…in its radio show form, it’s being heard in homes, cars, offices, and workplaces either over the air or through a stream…if you’re listening to the podcast, you might have downloaded it to a phone, a tablet or a laptop which you can fire up anywhere at your convenience… But imagine for moment that you couldn’t take your music with you…if you wanted to listen to your favourite songs, you had to be present in a specific place and you couldn’t move from it…and that usually meant music inside the home—or perhaps someplace with something like a jukebox… This might sound absolutely awful to you…I mean, we’re so used to conjuring up music whenever we want and wherever we are…we take it with us everywhere…it’s hard to imagine life without that ability… That’s the way it was for most of human history, though…for centuries and centuries, the only way to make music portable was to bring a musical instrument with you and play it yourself… The idea of making recorded music portable—at least in a way that is convenient, cheap, and reliable—is more recent than you might think…and it went through way more incarnations than you may realize… What do you say we take a look at the history of portable music?... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's Alan, and I just wanted to let you know that you can now listen to the ongoing history of new music early and ad-free on Amazon music, included with Prime.
0:09.4	Right, home from work, walk the dog, kids are back.
0:13.7	Mom!
0:14.3	Up the stairs for something.
0:17.1	Back down, no idea what I went up for.
0:22.6	Mom, what's for dinner? Chop, sizzle, done.
0:25.6	Hello Fresh can't slow life down, but it makes bringing everyone together around the table a whole lot easier.
0:32.6	So it's phones down, forks up.
0:34.6	Hello Fresh, bring back dinner time. There are phones down, forks up. Hello, Fresh. Bring back dinner time.
0:48.1	There are three moments when I remember looking at something in my hands and realizing that this thing was going to change my life.
0:53.6	The first time was on my sixth birthday when my grandmother gave me a portable transistor radio.
0:55.0	I was still awfully young,
1:02.1	but I somehow knew that I could now control not only what I listened to, but where and when,
1:08.5	a big deal when mom and dad controlled the radio. The second time was in 1999 when I was given a prototype of a device called an RCA Lyra. It was an early digital
1:14.3	music player capable of holding up to an hour's worth of music. And no matter how hard I shook
1:20.0	it, the music would not skip. For someone who liked to go running to music, that was a really
1:25.2	big deal. And the third time was when I searched for and found an obscure song on my iPhone.
1:32.7	I had just installed the long-gone audio app and was still very skeptical about this whole new
1:39.1	streaming thing.
1:40.4	The idea that you just paid for access and not to own the music was rubbish until that day
1:46.5	when I figured it out. We've come such a long way when it comes to making music portable,
1:51.8	especially in the 21st century. What was once science fiction is now reality. Taking our music
	...

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