From cassette to cloud

If you wanted to hear a new album in 1995, you went to the record shop. You paid, got a CD in a plastic case with a booklet full of lyrics and photos, and took it home. That CD was yours. You could lend it out, put it on a cassette for a friend, and find it again twenty years later in a moving box. If you want to hear an album now, you open an app. Everything is ready at once, for a fixed amount a month or free with adverts in between. But you own nothing any more. If you stop paying, your collection is gone.

That switch happened fast, and the CD itself played a leading part in it. In Mixtape 7 (The 1980s) the compact disc came onto the market, developed by Philips and Sony. In the 1990s it became the standard. For the buyer a CD cost more than an LP, but for the record company it was cheap to make. The industry earned more from it than ever before. At the same time, the CD contained the beginning of the end. The music was stored digitally, as a long series of ones and zeros. A copy on cassette always sounded slightly worse than the original. A digital copy is exactly the same as the original, and so is the copy of the copy. Anyone who put the music from a CD on a computer had a file that could be multiplied endlessly. That brings us to the question this chapter follows: what changes about music when you no longer own it, but only have access to it?

In the early 1990s the guitar music that mattered came from America. Nirvana, Pearl Jam and other bands from Seattle made grunge: heavy, distorted guitars and lyrics full of unease. Those records were popular in England too. Around 1993 a group of British bands deliberately chose a different direction. They looked not to America but to their own country and their own pop history: the Beatles, The Kinks, The Who and the mods of the 1960s. The press gave the movement a name: Britpop. In Mixtape 4 (When rock was still pop) Britpop belongs to the story of rock music. Here it is about the moment when a guitar battle was still decided in the record shop.

Two bands became the leading players, and the media liked to set them against each other. Blur came from London. Singer Damon Albarn, guitarist Graham Coxon, bassist Alex James and drummer Dave Rowntree had a clever, ironic image. Coxon and James had studied at Goldsmiths College, a London college with a well-known art course. Oasis came from Manchester, from a working-class family. The brothers Noel and Liam Gallagher had never seen the inside of an art school. Noel, the elder, had worked as a roadie for the Manchester band Inspiral Carpets and wrote all the songs. Liam sang them, with a nasal voice and his hands behind his back. In the press the difference was blown up into a contrast of class: the students from the south against the lads from the north.

Musically, too, they differed. Blur wrote songs about everyday English life, with characters and small stories, as Ray Davies of The Kinks had done in the 1960s. In Parklife (1994) the verses are not sung but spoken, by the actor Phil Daniels, in a broad London accent. Albarn only sings the chorus. It sounds like music hall, the British variety theatre of around 1900, where performers with strong accents delivered songs about ordinary life. Oasis looked mainly to the Beatles (see Mixtape 3) and to the loud guitar rock of the 1970s. Their songs have simple chords, a wall of guitars and vocal lines that recall John Lennon.

On Monday 14 August 1995 it came to a confrontation. That day Blur released the single Country House and Oasis released the single Roll With It. Newspapers and television news turned it into a contest, the Battle of Britpop, and fans were expected to choose. The result came on Sunday, with the new chart. Blur won. Country House sold about 274,000 copies in its first week, Roll With It about 216,000. Blur was at number 1, Oasis at number 2.

In the long run it turned out differently. In autumn 1995 the albums by both bands appeared. Blur released The Great Escape, Oasis (What's the Story) Morning Glory?. That second album became one of the best-selling albums in British history and sold many millions more copies worldwide than Blur's. The single Wonderwall got no higher than number two in England, but was also a hit in America, something British guitar bands rarely managed in those years. Blur won the chart, Oasis won the world.

Wonderwall lets you hear why. The song revolves around an acoustic guitar with a capo on the second fret. Noel Gallagher plays chords in which a few strings keep ringing open, so that the sound becomes full and slightly floating. Later a cello and other strings join in. The tempo is relaxed, the chords are easy to learn, and the melody lies within the range of anyone who sings along. That is how it became the campfire song of a generation: the song someone starts up on the guitar at a party or on a beach.

In August 1996 Oasis played two nights in the park of Knebworth House, north of London, for about 250,000 people in total. A year later Labour under Tony Blair won the election. The new prime minister received Noel Gallagher at Downing Street, and the newspapers spoke of Cool Britannia. After that the wave quickly ran out. In 1997 Blur in fact distanced itself from the English sound and scored with Song 2, a short, loud track that sounded like the American rock Britpop had at first turned against. In hindsight the Battle of Britpop is one of the last times that a fight between two guitar bands was decided in the chart by the number of people who bought a disc.

On the European mainland, very different music was playing in those same years. In clubs and on the radio, Eurodance was the thing: dance music with a solid house beat, a rapped verse and a sung chorus. The beats came from house and techno, the music from Chicago, Detroit and the European clubs covered in Mixtape 8 (Electronic music). Producers in Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and Italy used them to build short, fast pop songs that reached the charts all over Europe. Well-known examples are Rhythm Is a Dancer by Snap! (1992), Mr. Vain by Culture Beat (1993) and What Is Love by Haddaway (1993).

The most successful act had Dutch faces and a Belgian factory behind it. 2 Unlimited consisted of the Dutch performers Ray Slijngaard and Anita Doth. The music was made by the Belgian producers Phil Wilde and Jean-Paul De Coster. After Get Ready for This (1991) came No Limit in 1993. That track was number 1 in much of Europe, including the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.

If you listen closely to No Limit, you hear a construction kit. There is a short synthesizer riff that keeps coming back. Ray raps the verses, Anita sings the chorus, which consists almost only of the title. Halfway through, the music drops back to the beat: the break, the moment when the dance floor catches its breath before everything comes crashing back in. Every part can be swapped out separately. That turned out to be true in England, where the single came out in a version in which the rap was largely cut out. Even without a verse, the track still worked.

So Eurodance was a formula, just like the hits from the hit factories of Mixtape 12. The producers made the music in the studio and only then looked for a singer, a rapper and a face to go with it. To the public, Ray and Anita were 2 Unlimited, but the songs came into being with Wilde and De Coster. That is the same method as Stock Aitken Waterman in London, with the beats from the clubs.

In England in those same years a pop group was almost literally designed. In 1994 an advertisement appeared in the trade paper The Stage looking for young women for a new girl group. From the auditions and a change of line-up shortly afterwards came five singers: Geri Halliwell, Melanie Brown, Emma Bunton, Melanie Chisholm and Victoria Adams, later Victoria Beckham. They soon broke away from the men who had come up with the group and chose a manager of their own, Simon Fuller. In the summer of 1996 their first single appeared, Wannabe, written by the five together with Matt Rowe and Richard Stannard. The song was number 1 in England and, in 1997, in the United States too.

The Spice Girls became a brand. A British music magazine gave each member a nickname: Ginger, Scary, Baby, Sporty and Posh. Every fan could recognise themselves in one of the five. In Wannabe each member gets a line of her own, so that you hear the characters before you see them. The group had a slogan, girl power, and besides CDs they sold dolls, soft drinks, clothing and, in 1997, a feature film of their own, Spice World. What that slogan meant is still debated. For many girls it was a first encounter with the idea that friendship between women and self-confidence matter more than a boyfriend. Critics saw mainly a sales trick. In Mixtape 10 (Women in pop music) that tension between message and marketing is central. What matters most here is that in the 1990s a pop group became a product with five faces, a slogan and a shop shelf full of merchandise.

In the late 1990s the music industry sold more than ever. Around 1999 worldwide revenue from recorded music was at its highest point so far. Most of that money came from the CD. In those years many people replaced their old records and cassettes with CDs. They bought the same albums for the second time, and the record companies reissued their back catalogues, as deluxe editions or as compilations.

The business model revolved around the album. A CD with ten to fifteen tracks cost much more than a single. Anyone who wanted one hit often bought the whole album, even if the rest of the songs meant little to them. In the United States record companies sometimes stopped releasing popular songs as separate singles at all, so as not to hold back album sales. For the industry that was favourable. For the listener it meant paying the price of fifteen songs for one. That ratio would flip within a few years.

A large part of the sales came from teenagers. From Cheiron Studio in Stockholm, where Max Martin and his colleagues worked (see Mixtape 12), came the hits of the Backstreet Boys, *NSYNC and Britney Spears. Their albums sold millions at a time. Britney Spears's debut album, ...Baby One More Time (1999), sold more than ten million copies in the United States alone. In 2000 *NSYNC sold more than 2.4 million copies of their album No Strings Attached in America in its first week, a record that stood for fifteen years.

In ...Baby One More Time (1998) you hear how these hits were built. There is no long introduction. After three hard piano chords Britney sings "Oh baby, baby" straight away, and with that the hook is already in. You can read more about the lyrics and Max Martin's method of writing in Mixtape 12. Something else stands out here: the song wastes not a second. That was handy for radio and for the video on MTV, and it would become even more important later, when listeners could move to the next song with a single tap.

The CD boom was the peak of the physical format. After Tin Pan Alley, where you bought sheet music (Mixtape 1), came the 78 rpm record, the single, the LP, the cassette and the CD. Each time you bought an object, and that object was the music. The CD was the last and most profitable object in that series. A CD holds more than an hour of music, stored as 44,100 measurements per second per channel. That comes to about ten megabytes per minute. By the late 1990s more and more computers had a CD drive, and CD burners became affordable too. If you put a CD in the computer, you could take the tracks off it, ripping them in the jargon, and save them as files. Only, those files were still too big to send easily over the internet. One more step was needed for that.

That step was the MP3. The file format was developed at the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany, with engineer Karlheinz Brandenburg among others. The idea is clever: MP3 throws away what the human ear hardly hears. A soft tone sounding right next to a loud tone, for example, is dropped, because the loud tone drowns it out anyway. That makes a song about ten times smaller. A four-minute song that takes up about forty megabytes on a CD fits in about four megabytes as an MP3. With the dial-up modems of the late 1990s, downloading that still took a quarter of an hour or more. But at universities, where students had a fast connection, it took a few seconds.

One of those students was Shawn Fanning, a first-year at Northeastern University in Boston. In June 1999, together with Sean Parker, he released a programme that let you search for and share MP3s: Napster, named after Fanning's nickname. It worked peer-to-peer, from user to user. There was no central shop and no central storage. Napster only kept a list of who had which songs on their computer. If you were looking for a song, you fetched it directly from someone else's hard drive, somewhere in the world. What you had, someone else could fetch from you in turn. Within two years tens of millions of people were sharing music this way, for free.

For listeners it was a revelation. Every song that had ever been released suddenly seemed within reach, including obscure b-sides, live recordings and records that had not been on sale for years. You no longer had to buy an album for one song. You made your own collections and burned them onto a blank CD: the mixtape of the 1990s now lived on a disc.

For artists and record companies it was theft. The case acquired a face when Metallica discovered that I Disappear, a track for the film Mission: Impossible 2, was already circulating on Napster before it had officially been released. In April 2000 the band sued Napster. Drummer Lars Ulrich became the figurehead of the fight, and many fans held it against him: a rich rock band attacking its own audience. Rapper and producer Dr. Dre filed a similar case shortly afterwards. The major record companies had already gone to court together in December 1999. The point was simple: their music was being shared for free without permission, and nobody was paying the makers.

It was precisely that central list that proved fatal to Napster. Because the company kept track of who shared what, the court could hold it responsible for what happened through the service. In July 2001 Napster went offline. The sharing simply carried on. Successors such as Kazaa, LimeWire and later BitTorrent worked without a central list and were therefore much harder to shut down. The American record industry then began suing ordinary users, including students and teenagers. That mainly produced bad press. CD sales began to fall, and would never recover. The industry had made a copyable product and the public had copied it.

In October 2001 Apple, based in Cupertino in California, presented a small white music player: the iPod. MP3 players had existed for a few years, but they could hold few songs and were hard to use. The iPod had a hard drive and a scroll wheel that let you quickly browse a long list. Steve Jobs introduced it with a sentence that summed up the idea: a thousand songs in your pocket. Your whole record collection fitted in your jacket.

Those thousand songs had to come from somewhere. In April 2003 Apple opened the iTunes Store, a shop where you could legally download music for 99 cents a track. The record companies agreed because after Napster they needed a legal alternative, and because the files were given copy protection. More important was something else: from now on you could buy one song instead of a whole album. That broke apart the business model of the CD boom, in which you paid for the whole album to get one hit. The single came back, but as a file.

In October 2008 a service started in Stockholm that went one step further. Spotify, founded by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon, no longer sold songs. You paid for access to the whole catalogue: free with adverts between the songs, or without adverts with a monthly subscription. In 2010 Spotify came to the Netherlands. Other services followed, such as Apple Music and Deezer, and YouTube also became the place where many people listened to music. The question shifted from "do you have it?" to "can you get to it?". Building a collection was no longer necessary, because everything was already there.

That also changed the form in which we hear music. The playlist took over the role of the album and of the home-made mixtape. It is also the form of this series: each chapter is a mixtape, and the Spotify playlist at the back is the cassette you would record from it. But a large part of playlists are no longer made by listeners themselves. Editorial teams at streaming services compile lists for every moment of the day, and an algorithm helps choose what you hear. Such a rule of calculation looks at what you play and skip, and at what people with a similar taste listen to. From that it compiles a list of songs you will probably like too. What the algorithm does not choose, hardly anyone hears.

The distribution of money changed too. An artist no longer gets a share of the price of a CD, but an amount per stream, and that amount is a fraction of a cent. The money goes first to the rights holders: the label that owns the recording, the publisher and the writers. What the artist keeps depends on their contract. For an artist with millions of listeners that can add up to a lot. For a beginning band it is often almost nothing. A stream only counts after thirty seconds, and that has changed the shape of pop songs, as you can read in Mixtape 12: shorter intros, the hook early, shorter songs. In this way the way music is distributed affects the music itself.

In December 2018 a nineteen-year-old rapper from Atlanta put a song online. He called himself Lil Nas X and had no record contract and no producer. He had bought the beat online, for 30 dollars, through the website BeatStars. The maker was the Dutch producer YoungKio, Kiowa Roukema. He had built it on a sample from 34 Ghosts IV by the American industrial band Nine Inch Nails: a few notes on a banjo. Lil Nas X rapped a story over it about a cowboy on a horse. The result was called Old Town Road.

In the song you hear two worlds. The banjo, the cowboy hat and the horse come from country music. The beat comes from trap, the hip hop of Atlanta, with a deep 808 bass and hi-hats that rattle in fast rolls. Over it Lil Nas X raps and sings in a slightly nasal voice. The chorus is short and easy to remember. The whole song lasts less than two minutes.

The song became big through TikTok, the app for short videos that broke through worldwide in 2018. On TikTok you choose a sound clip and make a video to go with it. In early 2019 thousands of videos appeared on Old Town Road. The moment the chorus kicks in, people turn into a cowboy: they drink from a bottle that suddenly turns out to be 'yee yee juice', or suddenly appear on screen in boots and a hat. Every video was an advert for the song, made by users themselves. Anyone who had heard the clip looked it up on Spotify or YouTube. There the streams counted towards the charts.

Then the discussion started. Old Town Road ended up on Billboard's American country chart. In March 2019 Billboard took the song off it again: it was said not to contain enough elements of country music. Many people found that strange, because there are songs on that chart that are further from country. The question underneath it is an old one. Who decides which genre a Black artist belongs to? Back in the 1920s American record companies sold music by Black musicians separately, as race records, and music by white rural musicians as hillbilly, the forerunner of country. That separation already came up in Mixtape 6 (Fear of a Black Planet). Lil Nas X responded with a remix, together with country singer Billy Ray Cyrus. After that, the question of whether it was country was hard to deny.

The remix became one of the biggest hits of the streaming era. Old Town Road spent nineteen weeks at number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, longer than any song before it. The story shows how the music industry had changed in ten years. An unknown maker could have a worldwide hit without a label, with a 30-dollar beat from a producer in the Netherlands. A clip of a few seconds on a phone decided whether a song caught on. And the old division into genres, with separate charts, radio stations and record racks for country, rock, r&b and hip hop, no longer matched the way people listened. On a playlist, genres sit side by side without effort. Listeners look for a mood rather than a genre: something to work to, to exercise to or to fall asleep to.

Anyone who writes and records a song actually makes two things. The first is the song itself: the melody and the lyrics. The rights to that are called the publishing, and they belong to the writer and their publisher. That system has existed since Tin Pan Alley, when writers and publishers in New York founded ASCAP (see Mixtape 12). The second is the recording: the captured performance, as you hear it on a CD or in a stream. That original recording is called the master. Because the record company used to pay for the recording, the master usually belonged to the record company as well. An artist can therefore write and sing their own songs and still not own the recordings.

How big that difference is became clear in 2019 with Taylor Swift. As a teenager she signed a contract with Big Machine Records in Nashville. Her first six albums appeared there, including Fearless (2008). In 2018 she moved to another label, with a contract in which she owned the masters of her new music herself. The recordings of the old albums stayed with Big Machine. In 2019 Big Machine was sold, masters and all, to a company owned by music manager Scooter Braun. Swift was unable to buy back her own recordings. A year later Braun sold the masters on to an investment firm.

Swift was, however, the writer of her songs. That gave her a way out: as the writer she was allowed to record the songs again. From 2021 she re-released her old albums, with the addition Taylor's Version. The first was Fearless (Taylor's Version). The new recordings are played almost note for note, often with the same musicians. The biggest difference is her voice, which sounds thirteen years older and fuller.

The plan worked because it was about streaming. Fans now listened to the new versions and ignored the old links. On playlists the old recordings were replaced by the new ones. Anyone who wanted to use a Swift song in a film or advert also needed her permission as the writer for the old recording, and she only gave it for the new one. As a result the old masters became worth less. In 2025 Swift bought back her old masters after all. She had won the fight for her own recordings by making them one more time.

The question of who owns the music runs through this whole book. In Tin Pan Alley the publishers earned money from the sheet music. Big Mama Thornton was the first to record Hound Dog, in 1952, but the big money went to the version by Elvis Presley and to others (see Mixtape 10). In the 1990s Prince appeared in public with the word slave written on his cheek, in protest against his record company Warner, which owned his masters. The difference from the past is that an artist now has an alternative. Through distribution services such as DistroKid or TuneCore anyone can put music on Spotify and Apple Music for a small fee, without a record company. Anyone who does so keeps the masters, but also pays for the recording, the video and the promotion themselves. The artist becomes their own label. For anyone who is going to release music themselves, that is not theory: always check in a contract who gets the masters, and for how long.

For now this is the last chapter of the series. It began with sheet music and 78 rpm records, and it ends with a stream you cannot hold. Every format changed the music: the three-minute single, the album as a whole, the CD with one hit and ten other songs, the stream that counts after thirty seconds, the clip of a few seconds on TikTok. What remained is that new music builds on old music. Old Town Road carries the banjo of early country and the beat of hip hop from Atlanta. Wonderwall would look different without the Beatles. Blinding Lights sounds like 1985. If you listen closely to a song of today, you hear the earlier mixtapes in it.