Surrounded by music

Expanding choice The sources of music have multiplied

Inside the lobby of Taj Krishna, a woman in shorts and a towel wrapped around her shoulders walks in. She stops and with a beatific smile, oblivious to the world, she moves both her hands like a conductor as she hears the hotel’s piped music: Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.

If some of the malls are playing piped WorldSpace radio, then a few apartment complexes too are moving to playing piped inhouse music, inside RTC buses you can catch the FM radio, jogging?

You can have the iPod Nano rigged to your shoe and after the jog you can count the calories burnt. Driving? Let your music cellphone keep you entertained. There you are.

Sometime back it was music on the go, now it is music everywhere.

So, how do you listen to music now? On your music system, on the DVD player with video, on the radio, on the iPod or on the music phone for which you paid a bomb or are you waiting for 16GB iPhone where you move from one album to another? Or have you downloaded all your music collection onto a 500 GB external hard drive and rigged it up to the music system? Or do you listen to streaming Internet radio with hundreds of channels in niche configurations?

The record companies might quibble that their earnings are down, but the choice for listeners is expanding by the minute.

Buy any audio CD, play it on your computer and a copy is ready that can be sent to a friend, copied to the MP3 player, cellphone or the external hard drive.

There was a time when Exhibition at Nampally meant listening to the old Hindi film numbers. Now, the songs are the same, but the source is different. Instead of cassettes, the radio station at the Exhibition is using MP3 CDs that have on an average 600 songs. Multiply that with a few dozen CDs and you have most of the popular numbers in one shelf.

SERISH NANISETTI

© Copyright 2000 - 2009 The Hindu