Porter said that about one percent of 8tracks 8 million monthly active users make their own playlists. “You end up with playlists that are really deep,” he said. 8tracks CEO David Porter told me during a recent interview that this emphasis on human curation makes for a more focused experience. and so it goes.Īs for myself – I’ve stuck with records and am quite happy.Playlist-centric personal radio service 8tracks relaunched its website Thursday with new ways for listeners to find DJs they like, and new analytics and real-time monitoring tools that aim to make the service more engaging for DJs.Ĩtracks is a bit like Pandora, inviting users to lean back and listen for free, but with a key twist: Instead of just automatically compiling personalized streams, 8tracks emphasizes DJs that upload tracks to the service and compile them to playlists. Then the CD became overshadowed by iTunes and mp3s…. Indeed, the cassette’s reign of glory was short lived as well barely making it out of the eighties before the CD beat it into submission. Like all technologies, it got supplanted by something else. For a few years, it was awesome and we loved it. Perhaps an Atari-8-track combo would’ve given it just enough cool points to stay around a few years longer.īut let’s not be too hard on the eight-track. But since the eight-track was under-delivering, all it took was a competing product being just a couple dollars cheaper.įile under 8-tracks we’d love to have seen. In other words, the cassette wasn’t exactly a revelation the way CDs and mp3s seemed to be at first so, there was no reason to think a slightly lower price would matter so much. Ultimately isn’t this what it all boils down to? If the eight-track had been a pinch more reliable and worked out its kinks, perhaps the lower price wouldn’t have been such a death blow. Either way, it was a thoroughly miserable listening experience. Best case: a faint background of an altogether different track. Worst case scenario: two songs at equal pitch playing at the same time. I’ll just point out that, if the heads became misaligned even slightly (a VERY common occurrence) the one track would bleed-through into another track. I won’t go into the mechanics of the eight-track (there’s always Wikipedia for that). or at least a few hours before it busted. While the cassette and record would abruptly stop when it reached the end of a side, the eight-track would play for all eternity…. This negative wasn’t quite outweighed by a strong positive quality of the eight-track: it was on an infinite loop. It was a breath of fresh air to be able to roll backwards with the cassette tape. It may seem trivial, but not being able to rewind become a real downside to the eight-track. And so, unlike the source of pride which was your record collection, the filthy eight-track collection often became a thing of shame in the floorboard of your car. There was no real outer decorative case as with CDs and cassettes, just the cartridge. Thus, everyone’s collection consisted of sturdy cartridges with worn, peeling and stained stickers. As I mentioned, the case was basically bulletproof, but the sticker was not. FILTHY AND TRASHY MUSIC COLLECTION OF SHAMEĭespite the fact that eight-tracks began as techno-marvels, developed by Bill Lear (of Lear Jets no less), they soon earned a reputation as being not only unreliable, but also tacky. The music industry would learn to live with a degree of illegal copies on the market, but the eight-track absorbed the initial scorn.ĥ. Perhaps it wasn’t directly responsible, but the ability to easily make backyard bootlegs didn’t do the eight-track any favors in the reputation department. An 8-track bootleg.īut did the growing abundance of homemade eight-tracks really have anything to do with its downfall? After all, the cassette tape was geared toward making unlicensed recordings.
0 kommentar(er)
