Sure, iPods were cool, and totally changed the course of music history. But even before we were all shelling out hundreds of dollars to store our entire compressed music collections in our pockets, there was another, cheaper solution that did most of the work already: MP3 CDs.
As an audio storage medium, CDs could only ever carry about 74 minutes worth of music—maybe 20 or so songs at best, if you really wanted to get the most bang for your buck. But CDs could also be used as CD-ROMs, which could hold about 650 megabytes of data. With your average compressed mp3 files (read: whatever you got off Limewire or Napster) clocking in around 3 megabytes, that means you could potentially store more than 200 songs on a single CD! And by the late 90s, most CD players had the capacity to read mp3 file data off of compact discs.
Technology Connections got me reminiscing about the days of trying to explain this to my friends, thanks to their recent informational retrospective video on the wonders of MP3 CDs. Sure, we were all burning and copying CDs for each other—but I remember my teenage self trying to show off the maximalist capabilities of dumping something like the entire Ramones discography onto a single CD-ROM. (I also occasionally did the same thing with low-quality mp4 video bootlegs of The Adventures of Pete and Pete, which I'd bring to my friends' houses, leaving them confused as to why it wasn't an actual DVD.)
Granted, you can do all of that with a phone now. But unfettered access to the entirety of media at the tap of a screen doesn't quite have the same thrill as the hunt and discovery of mp3s at the turn of the millennium.
Previously: Why we like fried chicken and vinyl
