In today's connected world when even your mobile phone can play music and videos and store your entire music library in a device smaller than a pack of cards it's hard to Imagine a time when the only way to play and listen to music was on a radio, vinyl LP or cassette.

No CDs, no mp3, no YouTube, no Internet and portable cassette players bigger than a current mobile phone. For a teenager with limited funds unable to buy the latest albums the only way to listen to their choice of music was to record from the radio onto cassette and the ideal time for that was Sunday between 5 and 7pm during the Radio 1 Top 40 show.

Chart show taping music in 1980s


Listening intently to the chart positions to work out where your favourite song would be and consequently what time it would be played . Preparing the cassette so that all was ready to press record as soon as the DJ announced the artist and song title but after they had finished speaking became a finely honed art so that you avoided the cut off words and tried to catch as much of the intro as you could.

Unlike today's iPod's or MP3 players there was no direct access to listen to each song so you had to fast forward or rewind and guess the number of seconds to reach your desired track. The introduction of music search that detected the gaps between songs was a revelation quickly overtaken by CDs where you could program tracks and jump to them in any order.

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