By Louie Ferrera

How amazing is Spotify? Just think, for a small monthly fee I can listen to practically any song I want whenever I want. On demand baby…what a concept. The person or persons who first conceived of online music streaming should be knighted or elevated to sainthood, or something like that. However, there’s usually a flip side to a good thing and that’s what this story is about.

Before the advent of music streaming, if you wanted to hear songs by your favorite artists you had basically two options. The first option was to go to a record store and buy an album or single. The late, great Tower Records (where I worked from 1979-1982) was the greatest record store of all time. Tower was open 9am to midnight, 365 days a year. They were a “deep catalogue” store, meaning that if an artist had a record that was commercially released, Tower carried it. There was no record too obscure for Tower. I remember one night back in the 80’s, a few friends of mine and I were sitting around our apartment listening to  music when for reasons lost to the fog of time, we just had to hear Stop Your Sobbing by The Pretenders. Into the car we went and down to Tower where we bought that first Pretenders album. Putting the needle down on to the vinyl when we got home and hearing Chrissie Hynde’s acappella opening to that classic Kinks song was a moment straight out of High Fidelity or Almost Famous. What made this experience so memorable to me was the process we had to go through in order to hear that particular song at that particular moment. We earned that listen!

The second option was simply to tune into your favorite radio station and wait to hear a song or artist. At one time, there were actual live DJs on the radio, imagine that? (Ok, there are still live DJs on a few Sirius XM stations, but they’re the exception rather than the rule). On the stations I listened to, the DJs had a lot of latitude in choosing the music for their shows. Knowledge of an individual DJs musical tastes increased the odds of hearing the music that you liked best. You may have waited all day, or days to hear a song so when it came on, you busted out your air guitar and sang along at the top of your lungs.

One night deep into the late 70’s my friend Kenny and I were driving back to New Jersey from Manhattan when Meatloaf’s classic Paradise By The Dashboard Lights came roaring through the speakers. Todd Rundgren’s screaming guitar intro, members of the E Street Band, Mr. Loaf at the top of his game…what a song! We weren’t going to miss a note. However, our car was approaching the Lincoln Tunnel, a dead zone for radio reception. What to do? Well, we pulled over just short of the tunnel’s entrance, shut off the engine and had ourselves an authentic rock and roll moment. 

Vignettes like I’ve just recounted basically couldn’t happen anymore. Even if you wanted to go to a record store to buy music, you’d be hard pressed to even find one and why would you do it anyway when just about any song that you’d ever want to hear is available at your fingertips on any of the online streaming services? Just ask Siri or Alexa and she’ll have it on in a jiffy.

The variety of music now available instantaneously is mind boggling. Now don’t get me wrong, I love online streaming and am a happy subscriber, but we’ve lost something here. I loved when a favorite song of mine would come on the radio, it was always a delightful surprise, a mini epiphany, like finding a $20 in my jeans pocket that I didn’t know I had. Now that I can hear that song anytime, anywhere, as many times as I want, that tune has lost a little bit of its luster. I loved the human touch of a DJ, spinning their favorite tunes and talking so effusively about them. I had some great conversations with late night DJs while calling in to make a request. I was a DJ at one time myself. It was really cool knowing that the music I played was the soundtrack of someone else’s life. I loved the treasure hunt at a record store, the music playing over the speakers, the people I’d meet there, the employees as fanatical about music as I was.

Like it or not we’re living in the age of instant gratification, so the idea of actually having to be patient and wait for something like music must seem foreign to many people. Putting in the hours listening to the radio or browsing the racks at a record store usually paid off, you got what you wanted and maybe even discovered some new music in the process. It was joy earned. If Spotify or Apple Music had existed in 1977, my moment at the Lincoln Tunnel would never had happened. Stop Your Sobbing? It’s now just a tap away.

Have you seen That Thing You Do? It’s a film about a fictitious Beatle-esque band in the early 1960’s called The Wonders. This quartet of kids go from obscurity to headliners overnight with the eponymously titled hit single. The moment that their song debuts on the local radio station is a key scene in the film. One by one, the band members hear the song; first the songwriter’s girlfriend, then the drummer, who run into the bass player’s dad’s appliance store where he’s working. Next the two guitar players pull up out front and rush in, having heard the song on the car radio. The band members crank up a radio while they whoop, holler and hug, dancing around the store in a display of unbridled celebration. It’s one of the most joyous moments in any rock and roll film. There was no Spotify, there was no Pandora. Their song just came on the radio. It was random, it was unexpected, it was magical