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How we listen to music in 2022

cassettes-cds-streaming — Image: Technology exists to convert a cassette to MP3 – have we had a copyright ruling on that?

This week I decided to reflect on the many ways we can listen to music in this digital age. We’ve come a long way since the first recording etched on to a wax cylinder in 1860. In just 50 years, the mainstream way of listening to music has moved from vinyl LPs to cassettes to CDs and now to online streaming. It’s been quite an evolution.

This FOMM was inspired by a frustrating search for an album by Californian bluegrass singer AJ Lee and her band, Blue Summit. I was introduced to AJ at U3A Warwick’s Music Show, where presenters curate a list of YouTube clips and provide background on the tracks. This particular song was performed by the Brothers Comatose and AJ Lee, a splendid interpretation of Neil Young’s Harvest Moon.

On Monday I started packing for a week away in the caravan, part of it at the best music festival in Queensland, Neurum Creek Festival. This one has been running for 16 years at the Neurum Creek Bush Retreat, which is about 12 kms from Woodford. In preparing and packing, I decided to see if I could load new music on my Ipod, which is no longer supported by Apple. The problem is that as I now longer use ITunes, the music player I use can’t ‘talk’ to the Ipod. Mr Shiraz sent me a link to a piece of software that will mimic ITunes so you can ‘sync’ your music collection with an Ipod, a portable music player invented by Apple in 2001. Since Apple stopped supporting Ipods, many users have opted to put them in a drawer and move on. One alternative is to buy a cheap mobile phone, add a large storage card and use it as a personal music player.

I could tell how far CDs had dropped in popularity when looking to buy AJ Lee’s 2021 album, I’ll Come Back. I decided not to download it on Spotify, as the artists are paid a trifling amount when we listen to their music on that platform.

Subsequent searches found the album on streaming services, which was not what I wanted. I went direct to AJ Lee’s website and the only option was to purchase a physical CD and wait however many weeks or months it takes to arrive from the US. Then I tried Bandcamp (where you will find our music). Success, the album was there. I duly downloaded the album and now can listen to it on my computer, my phone and, once I get around to it, burn a CD for my ‘new’ 5-CD changer.

The CD player failed some months ago and I eventually established that the model was obsolete and a replacement laser could not be found. I opted for a refurbished model from a seller on Ebay. It’s a quality Sony deck and, so far, is working perfectly.

Before I went into hospital for a procedure in late August, I spent a day (dusting) and alphabetising our CD collection (450-plus). I told She Who Loves Order in her Life I had done this ‘so if I cark it, at least you’ll know the CDs are in A-Z and not filed according to ‘mood’.

As audiophiles will tell you, CD music is superior to cassette but inferior to vinyl, because the digital sound is compressed.

Vinyl music played on top line analogue systems always sounds better than both CDs and the alternative (playing or streaming MP3 quality tracks). The cassette, with its annoying hiss and tendency to become snarled in the player, is a long last.

Audio cassettes were invented by a Dutch company (Philips) and adopted by mainstream America in the mid-60s. My memory of cassettes is that people would borrow someone else’s tape and dub a cassette to play in the car. This practice was and still is illegal, even if retailers happily sold boxes of blank cassettes and high-end twin cassette decks on which one could dub to a blank tape. (The last piece of music technology I actually understood. Ed.)

Most of us have a couple of shoeboxes in the cupboard full of cassettes – legitimate ones bought in music stores, or bootleg copies. The difficulty now is that, for most people, their means of playing cassettes has evaporated. My tape deck worked for about 20 years. One deck stopped working and then the sound quality became so poor we decided to switch to another medium.

I did a straw poll among people of my vintage to establish how they listen to music (if they listen to music at all). Most said they no longer had a CD player (it either died or they found the business of swapping them over tedious). Most late model cars no longer come with a CD player, so that accelerated the decline in popularity.

Some people opt for a WIFI speaker through which they can stream music from YouTube or Spotify. How this works is you turn the gadget on and say in a loud, clear voice: “OK Google, play The Goodwills.” There is a pause, a whirring sound and a disembodied voice says: “OK, playing DJ Goodwill.”

Others turn on their smart TV and then search for music videos on YouTube. Depending on your cinema surround sound system (if you have one), the sound quality is OK. The database of video clips is apparently bottomless, but the quality is uneven.

According to Gizmodo’s history of the compact disc, the first commercial CDs were available in Australia in late 1982 (about 150 titles). This was a few years before we moved to Brisbane and bought a Technics stereo system for around $1,500 (it was on sale). We started a CD collection then and even today, I prefer a CD to any other format.

What is hard to stomach is knowing I paid $25 to $30 each and sometimes more for an imported disc. Today you can go to a charity shop and buy CDs for coins. It’s not about money, though. Our CD collection is special in that at least 100 CDs were given to us either as a gift or as a swap (one of ours for one of theirs) by musicians we know.

The Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) said streaming accounted for 86% of $565.8 million music sales in Australia in 2021. Over the same period, physical music sales dropped from $100.5 million to $56.1 million. Vinyl albums led the way at $29.7 million, compared with $24.9 million for CD albums.

A Roy Morgan research report in 2020 said 12.7 million Australians were using a streaming service. Spotify is the clear market leader with 8m customers, almost double what it was in 2017. YouTube Music is next with 4.4m users in Australia.

The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) concurs, saying 61% of Australians used a streaming service in June 2020, up from 48% in 2019. As you’d expect, 88% of the 18-34 age group used music streaming services. Surprisingly (well, I’m surprised), the biggest growth in online music streaming was the 55-64 cohort (from 47% to 59%), 65-75 (30% to 44%) and the over-70s (17% to 26%).

I confess I’m part of that trend, although this weekend it’s all about live music, coffee and a CD shop – the way it should be.

How many bloggers to change a lightbulb?

blog-bloggers-blogging — Image by Tanja-Denise Schantz www.pixabay.com

The question should be – is FOMM a blog, a topical weekly essay, Citizen journalism or the random musings of a flawed human being who craves attention?

When posting it on the WordPress website, I am reminded that FOMM is not a conventional blog. It’s those endless reminders from the SEO plug-in. For those who have no idea what that means, Search Engine Optimisation is the key to more hits and making it further up the tree of Google rankings. SEO is a nag machine – you already used this keyword – don’t do that. Almost every week it gives my screed a low score for readability. You reckon?

If you are engaged to write short, entertaining blog posts for a company, SEO is essential. If you are being asked to post 10 to 20 times a week you need SEO to penetrate the on-line miasma of ‘Content’.

The way I was brought up, content meant happy with your lot in life. What it means in blog marketing terms is to write entertainingly and splatter keywords throughout your Content. The more times you say ‘widget’ when writing about a widget the higher you will be ranked by Google’s search engines. It’s an insane marketplace.

There are 600 million blogs and 1.7 billion websites out there. They write about anything from Taiwan’s right to independence from China to why the bristles always fall out of shaving brushes. This is not counting the untold numbers of communiques from people who bypass the whole process and just send an email to a list of readers.

Joy, an environmental activist, starting emailing friends about five years ago when the Adani coal project and climate change deniers were unfortunate bedfellows. Joy tells me her missives are sometimes known by readers as ‘Joy’s blog’.

Joe Dolce, who wrote the novelty song ‘Shaddup Your Face’, wrote a weekly letter for years. I know this because a friend shared one of his long, eccentric emails with me and I subscribed.

Famous songwriter Eric Bogle writes a kind of a blog which he simply puts out there on his Facebook page. Sometimes they are, as he’ll say, grumpy old man rants. Other times, Bogle writes with great sensitivity and hits a nerve the way his best songs do.

This is the goal of bloggers – to grab the reader’s attention and hold it to the last word, Alluring headlines have their role to play and I must confess this is not my strong point as a writer. My strength (if indeed I have one) is that I post every Friday, no matter what else is going on in our lives (even on holidays, says ED, somewhat testily).

Daffodil-loving Ange is what I’d call a sporadic blog writer – the best of hers are when she and hubby hit the road and share the trials and travails and lovely images of their travel. I think they are still missing luggage from a trip to the Red Heart (but the daffies are out). My favourite Ange quote comes from a late 2021 Australian road trip.

“I’m so excited about travelling again I even ironed my Lorna Jane cargo pants.”

Australia’s oldest regular blogger Everald Compton, 90+, posts most weeks. Everald’s election-eve analysis of the state of politics and forecasts of things to come was almost 100% on the money and worth re-reading.

Everald, whose CV includes professional fundraiser, inland rail promoter and National Seniors chief executive, has a few favourite causes. In his latest blog he (again) calls for the inclusion of our indigenous people in Australia’s constitution.

Let’s be clear when distinguishing blogs and bloggers from writers who share their opinions about politics, sport, culture, indigenous affairs, climate change, the environment et al.

A blogger in the commercial sense of the word writes interesting (short) articles for companies that are trying to grow their on-line businesses. Let’s say you have a micro-business that makes useful but not indispensable tools. You’ve invented the perfect toenail cutter and employ a blogger to write enticing copy.

“The Toejam fits snugly into the palm, its laser-guided cutting blades fitting beneath the curviest toenail. Its in-built sensors sound an alarm if you are about to engage with flesh. The Toejam comes with a tiny vacuum attachment so you don’t leave toenail parings all over the bedroom floor. The wife really likes it!”

The deputy director of On-line Engagement (OE) fires back a terse email to the contract blogger.

“You only mention Toejam twice – for text of this length you should use the brand keyword at least six times. Also, the brief asked for 150 words so you are 95 words short. Try again and please, what does your wife have to do with anything?”

You can find on-line copy of this ilk designed to sell everything from green tea to rocket launchers. Yeh nah, FOMM is not a blog of that ilk.

Oberlo’s research reveals that micro blogging platform Tumbler is the king of Content, home to 488 million blogs. Its closest competitor, WordPress, hosts 78 million new posts on its platform every month. Four or sometimes five of these are mine.

Nine out of ten Content generators use blogs to sell stuff. Businesses with a blog receive 55% more visitors to their website than those that don’t. They also produce 67% more leads every month.

I decided back in 2014 if I was going to write a newspaper-style opinion column I’d need to write at least 800 words and settled on 1200. The on-line wisdom at the time was that short and fluffy works.

One of my early unsubscribers informed me: “Sorry, Bob. It’s TMTR.” I had to Google that and found it was slang for Too Much To Read.

For those who wish to write blogs that aren’t merely advertising avenues, experts like Databox now recommend writing blog posts of between 1,500 and 2000 words, as the average blog post length has increased over the past seven years from 800 to 1,200 words.

It’s hard to find an objective list of top blogs and when you do, many are mainstream media blogs, ranked by audience size rather than by content.

There are a few independent blogs in this Top 50 list from Feedly that cross over into my own list of recommended blogs (Pearls & Irritations, The Conversation, John Quiggan, Michael West).

The best blogs start as a simple on-line diary, usually generated when the writer is visiting new places. There are many great travel blogs including Nomadic Matt, The Blonde Abroad, Salt in our Hair, Little Aussie Travellers and Ange’s Around the World in 99 Days.

Last time I wrote about blogs and bloggers I mentioned the famous Swedish centenarian Dagny Carlsson, who recently died at the age of 109. She started blogging age 100 under the name Bojan after becoming “bored with retirement”. Her posts were short, to the point and often cheeky. At 106 she advised people to “stop whining and get a grip”. Dagny’s last blog post was on January 28 when she wrote: “like a cat, I have at least nine lives, but I do not know what I should use so much of life for.”

Frivolity aside, if you live in a country with a repressive regime, writing a blog is one (dangerous) way of keeping the world informed. I discovered (in 2017) the word blog in Farsi looks like this – وبلاگ. Iranians who didn’t like the way things were going in their country started وبلاگ’ing (blogging) like crazy after the 2000 crackdown on Iranian media. Although they are taking risks, rebel bloggers living in autocratic countries know their story will be picked up by libertarian journalists in democratic countries.

It’s the Internet, eh.

FOMM Back Pages

Little boxes – the genre-fication of music

music-genre-CD — Old-school CD music collection by Mr Shiraz)

Yes I know it’s my fault, but early in the days of turning my music into online MP3s, I accidently chose Christian Rap as a genre for one of my songs. The song I incorrectly categorised is called 53 & Fragile, about a fellow taking stress leave to ponder his future. I guess you could rap to it, in a God-less sort of way. It only took three years to discover this error.

An enterprising blogger (Glenn McDonald) compiled a list of 1,264 micro-genres; they include goa trance, aggrotech, gabba, yellow mellow, happyhardcore, terrorcore, ghost step and Nordic house.

There are many reasons why the recorded music business is in a state of flux but I continue to believe (and I’m not alone), that the industry’s insistence on streaming music into little boxes called genres has robbed many a musician of potential fans.

As Sydney Morning Herald reviewer Bernard Zuel said of a Luke O’Shea album – it is put into a box labelled Country and as a result, a great many people will never open that box. This is likely to be the case, despite someone with Zuel’s acumen identifying all manner of pop, rock and hip hop influences in O’Shea’s music.

When we released our CD, The Last Waterhole, in 2015, it was our first real engagement with online music. After labouring through the online applications (and printing out paper copies), our music was magically turned into MP3s (compressed audio files), and made available for download on CD Baby and subsequently ITunes, Amazon Music, Google Music and more.

We sold the expected number of CDs, but three years later our album has drifted out to sea as thousands of new releases come in with every second wave. Online sales are about as sporadic as our public appearances.

The indie market is cluttered with home-made CDs recorded on a laptop and flogged at markets for $10. Those with loftier ambitions engage a producer and typically spend $6,000 to $10,000, which is all very well if you can sell 500 copies at $20 each. At the high end of the game, production companies spend up to $100,000 on a CD that will jump out of the radio like a rabbit on steroids. But over a long span of time, I suspect, the listening public’s ears are getting tired of it all. There’s way too much of it, no quality control and the harsh, metallic attack of compressed digital music has taken the edge off the listening pleasure.

And, as our producer predicted, the day is coming when people won’t need to own CDs anymore – all they‘ll need is a Bluetooth speaker.

“OK, Google, play The Goodwills.”

“OK, here’s the YouTube channel for the DJ Goodwill.”

The science is imperfect, but it seems to be enough for an alarmingly large group of people, who can buy an OK-quality music-streaming speaker for a few hundred dollars. The latest research estimates the value of the global portable Bluetooth speaker market at over US$4 billion, expected to double by the end of 2025.

A few years back the grand dame of folk and blues Margret RoadKnight posted an article on Facebook from Digital Music News with the droll comment “Why I’m up for House/’Salon’ concerts!!”

The article outlined the industry’s 99 (main) problems, the key one being that musicians and artists are finding it harder to “monetize” what they do, whether performing or selling merchandise.

People have got used to free stuff and now they won’t pay unless they are very drunk and you’re giving away a t-shirt or stubby holder as well.

I asked a 20-something lad why he thought nothing of shelling out $20 for a pizza but he was reluctant to pay $20 for an album.

“Yeh, but I know what a meat lovers’ pizza is like, right? And I get garlic bread.”

“But you only get to eat the pizza once,” I reasoned. “You can play a CD over and over. A pizza won’t make you think about social issues.”

“Meh,” he said.

The Digital Music News article by Paul Resnikoff identifies issues with the method of delivering music. Streaming (subscription services which offer consumers a wide variety of music to listen to in-house but not download), continues to explode, but not enough to compensate for declines in physical CD sales and paid downloads.

We chose not to take up the offer to have our music on Spotify, a subscription streaming service, which in hindsight seems to have been a counter-productive decision. A musician friend Sarah Calderwood recently asked if we were on Spotify as she was compiling a playlist of Australian indie folk music which she planned to put on ‘repeat’.

If you have a Spotify account you can listen to Sarah’s playlist, which includes acts like Gone Molly, The Barleyshakes, Michael Fix, Women in Docs and Mark Cryle.

The independent musician, defined as a musician without financial backing, has to constantly find fresh ways of reaching new ears.

There’s a lot of indie musos around, competing with each other for gigs and CD sales. Increasingly they busk, or play for nothing at ‘walk-up’ venues which ask people to put their name on a blackboard and sing two or three songs. The artist might sell one or two CDs (if he or she is really good at making an impact and the song is up to the task). The alternative is a paid gig playing in a bar or restaurant where people go to eat, drink and talk.

Resnikoff writes that the key issue is that most consumers attribute very little value to the recording itself. They already heard the song on Spotify Soundcloud, Reverbnation, Bandcamp or YouTube.

The fractions of cents paid for streaming plays might add up to dollars eventually, but you need to keep selling ‘merch’ across all platforms.

From a financial point of view, it matters little to me that there are boxes of CDs in the hall cupboard, even if the ego grapples with the notion of relevancy.

It is a different story for people in their 20s and 30s who have decided to make music a full-time career. This involves constant touring, online management of their business and profile and (the thing nobody talks about), singing the same 10 or 12 songs every night, over and over. If you’re going for it, you have to keep churning out new material (thus consigning your older material to the remainder bin).

As one musician told me, “You have to keep putting new stuff out, even when you know it won’t pay for itself, otherwise you get forgotten about.”

House concerts, and we are long-term supporters, are a sure-fire way of giving musicians a listening audience. Even if only 20 people show up, it’s a better result financially and aesthetically than a rowdy Friday night pub gig. Audiences love the intimacy and the musical and lyrical nuances that are often lost in noisy, amplified venues. We’re hosting our 110^th house concert on June 10: check it out at

And the homemade afternoon tea on offer is guaranteed to be yummier than a meat lovers’ pizza and garlic bread.

Further reading: How Music Got Free, by Stephen Witt.

Facebook – does it really matter if they share our data?

Since we’re discussing Facebook and who has the rights to personal information you’ve posted, I wanted to show you my ‘Wall.’ People used to call their Facebook page their ‘Wall’, though that has become passe. As walls go, this one would be ‘liked’ by Shirley Valentine fans (cultural reference), as it suggests romance and sun-bleached beaches.

I joined Facebook in 2009 (apparently) as this is the first image I posted. At the time we were renovating the downstairs bedroom, rumpus room laundry and ensuite. Apart from hiring a guy to lay tiles throughout, we did all the work ourselves. If I’d known better, I’d have first put a coat of sealer on the besser brick wall as it took four coats of paint until it matched the hardboard on the opposite wall.

I resisted joining Facebook for such a long time and then when I did, my posts were few and sufficiently opaque to resist understanding by all but my inner circle.

Facebook has proved handy in terms of keeping in touch with younger family members around the world because, as we know, they don’t write letters. So too I’ve formed loose ties with musicians around the world, which can either be a way of sharing the passion or fishing for a gig.

Later, Facebook became a good way of spreading the news about folk music events in our small town, some of which we promote.

Dani Fankhauser’s history of Facebook on mashable.com charts the development of Facebook from its launch in 2004 and the 18 features it used to have and either changed or discontinued. I had no idea the original idea of the ‘wall’ was that people could use it like a whiteboard, leaving messages for their friends. You could change or delete what was there and replace it with your own messages. As Dani says, at one stage it was cool to ‘de-virgin’ someone (be first to post on their wall).

The wall disappeared and Timeline took its place. Other critical changes since Facebook was launched includes the controversial and constantly changing News Feed and the over-weaning Like button which turned social interaction into a competition.

Dani writes that Facebook used to be like a journey down the Rabbithole, being diverted down unexpected paths to discover new and interesting worlds. Now it’s like standing in front of the fridge with the door open, not quite sure what you’re looking for. Five years ago she wrote that – has anything changed?

The hoo-haa about fake news and private data being manipulated by computer data experts should surprise no-one. If you are on Facebook, you are the content.

You have probably read one version or another of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The Guardian Weekly ran a two-page expose this week so if you really want to delve into it, here’s the ultimate link.

The fall-out when this news broke was most noticeable on Wall Street. When the Observer revealed that Cambridge Analytica had harvested millions of people’s user data for political profiling, Facebook’s stock plummeted. It fell 17% between March 17 and Easter, wiping $US50 billion off the company’s value. Regulators in several countries are investigating Facebook and may try to limit how the company makes money from data.

Meanwhile,Google, Apple and Amazon are like little kids who played a joke on someone and are now hiding behind a tree, giggling. The laugh might be on them, according to this broader story.

There is a social movement (#DeleteFacebook), but social media analyst Andy Swan, writing for Forbes magazine, said the spike in Facebook deletions – the highest since 2004 – peaked on March 21 and has been in decline ever since.

Most of the outrage stems from reports that Donald Trump’s campaign consultants, Cambridge Analytica, used ‘psychographics’ which allows personality traits to be manipulated.

But what about our music pages, Mark?

In January this year Facebook began changing the algorithms that influence what users/members see in their news feed. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said the changes were made because of feedback that public content – posts from businesses, brands and media – was ‘crowding out the personal moments that lead us to connect more with each other’.

Changes started last year and as Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post, will take months to implement. “As we roll this out, you’ll see less public content (in your Newsfeed) like posts from businesses, brands, and media. And the public content you see more will be held to the same standard – it should encourage meaningful interactions between people.”

This must be a deeply disturbing trend for mainstream media, which has hooked its disintegrating business model to the hems of social media’s skirts.

Our local paper, the Sunshine Coast Daily (now owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Ltd), recently ran a 150-word ‘news story’ – Keep News #1 in your Facebook feed. The article suggested Daily readers keep up with the latest local news by ‘making a simple adjustment’.

This means first find the SCD page on Facebook, like, click ‘follow’ then click ‘see first’.

Well yes, it works, but it didn’t take long for the stream of sensationalist stories to ‘clutter up’ my news feed and the same could be said of choosing this option for other media outlets. Beware the Paywall!

Just for the mental exercise, I downloaded my Facebook data. It has always been possible to download your own data and if we were smart, we’d all do it every year so we at least can find copies of the photos we posted then forgot about. Just go to your profile page and click on settings (the link is at the bottom of the page).

Just downloading your data file does not mean you are deleting your information from Facebook. Leaving, closing your account and demanding the return of the original data is not so easy.

But it was illuminating to trawl through this 136MB file. There is an exchange (a thread) between me and a former colleague. I wished to write something about him in my blog, about the merits of academic ambition when one is supposedly past student age. Within the conversation, my former colleague revealed quite a lot of detail about his school years, what work he did on leaving school and how he came to study journalism. I used hardly any of this information in the blog which was eventually published. But it is sitting there quietly, within my (private) Facebook data files. Let’s hope it stays that way.

So what does the Cambridge Analytica privacy furore mean for folk who just want to post photos of their cats, dogs, partners and kids? Not much, I suspect, unless you have a ‘brand’ page like the ones I use for pur stage name, The Goodwills and this blog.

I thought it would be fair play to share Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook post. It is interesting for his over-use of marketing-speak and the sometimes snarky comments which follow his ‘community-oriented’ explanation for making business, brands and media pages less visible.

I’m with the people who asked why couldn’t Facebook users simply curate their own news feed without having it dictated by algorithms.

Meanwhile, if you want to keep the Bobwords brand page at the top of your news feed, click on the link, like and follow.

Or not!