Pirating Music-Old School

Remember the days when we all used to be active pirates of the music industry?

You do know what I’m talking about, and no, I’m not referring to Napster.

For full effect, download any given song that was produced in the early 1990’s, and play at maximum volume throughout the duration of this post. More than likely Keith Tronic will be able to tell you exactly who it is. He is that uncanny.

Take a moment to stroll back down memory lane and reminisce about all of the music that we all used to get illegally. Again, this was way before a thing such as Limewire was engineered into our dishonest transgressions. I’m talking about something that we all did even before Windows 95 was even released. Was there ever such a time? Of course there was back in the day.

Do you remember sitting next to your family’s radio on a Thursday night, with a freshly unpackaged Memorex blank recording tape in the cassette player. Meanwhile you were adamantly listening to 94.9 zHt, waiting for the song “I Swear” by All for One to come streaming over the airwaves so that you could hit the red record button on the stereo and suddenly have the song to yourself.

And there you would sit, for hours on end listening to the radio, putting in requests, hopeful that they would play one of your favorite songs, so that you could make your own “mixtape” and take it back into your room at night, listening to the songs over and over again, getting the lyrics embedded into your memory bank.

That was us. Before downloading, before pirating sites, heck even before Al Gore invented that thing called the Internet. That was a group of entertained sixth-graders trying to figure out the best solution to getting free music so that we all didn’t have to go out and pay $11.99 for the newest Boyz II Men tape.

And yes, that’s exactly how they used to release music, on tapes.

I kind of miss those days. The days when multimillion-dollar bands like Metallica and Blink-182 weren’t suing the pants off of elementary-age kids for pushing the record button on their home radio when one of their songs came on. Those were the days when it was absolutely alright to do something dishonest, unethical, blatantly illegal, and your parents just smiled and remembered the shining moments that they had in a ’74 Pinto and an 8-track.

Man, I miss being a kid.