Music In Cars

Back in the day when I first started driving, car stereos were stolen from cars with alarming regularity. It was just as easy to buy a car stereo in a dodgy pub car park as at Halfords at one time.

We had the stereo removed and stolen from our old Vauxhall Astra once. My brother-in-law was borrowing the car at the time and was mortified, but the funny thing was, the tape deck had packed up and we were about to replace it, so the insurance paid for a new one rather than us having to!

These days the theft of car stereos has dwindled, and car stereos are no longer just radio/cassette players anyway, motor manufacturers now call them infotainment systems, and as well as playing music, they incorporate your sat nav, and depending on your make and model, include all sorts of apps and features that connect to your phone and the broader internet.

Personally, I wouldn’t be without the sat nav in my car. There wasn’t an integral one in my previous car, so I used a TomTom attached to the windscreen instead, except it had a habit of falling off and rolling around the footwell at crucial moments, so I was very pleased when my new car (I say, new it’s seven years old now) came with an inbuilt sat nav.

I was slightly less pleased that whereas my old car had a six CD changer, my new one takes just a single disc, but chances are that if I bought a new car now, it wouldn’t have a CD player as standard, at all. The music industry has pretty much decided that owning physical copies of music is old hat, and only for collectors of oddities, like vinyl, and that we all want to stream or download our music, and motor manufacturers seem to have agreed. Well, I don’t.

Car infotainments systems come with a DAB radio and a means of connecting to your phone and hence Spotify, or Deezer, or whatever streaming service you favour, but maybe no CD player, and certainly no cassette deck!

As far as listening to music in cars is concerned, the audio cassette is the best method there has been, and the best there will be, I’ll brook no argument on that. CDs are great, but cassettes were the peak of in-car musical entertainment.

The best thing about cassettes was making a mix-tape specifically for the car. I did have a small collection of pre-recorded cassettes, but most were either old ones that I later replaced with CDs, or were from bargain bins – the 99p for 20 Great Electronic Hits of the 80s sort of thing – most were carefully curated from my CD collection, and usually had some sort of theme to them.

One might be proggy – Yes, Genesis, Pink Floyd, Peter Gabriel et al – and another poppy – ABC, Human League, Duran Duran – but many were an eclectic mix where Dire Straits would rub shoulders with Luther Vandross, while Kate Bush would ride in on the coat tails of Michael Jackson. Then there would be the live album featuring all the bands I’d like to see in a single setting.

My favourite though, was a mixture of covers and their originals, and different songs with the same title.

It included Comfortably Numb by Pink Floyd, and the Scissor Sisters’ cover version; Lay Your Hands on Me, two different songs of the same name, by Peter Gabriel and Thompson Twins; and Doctor, Doctor, also different songs, by Thompson Twins again, and UFO.

There was an art to fitting as close to 45 minutes of music onto one side of a C90 cassette without chopping off the end of the last track or leaving two minutes of dead tape. And when recording had to be done in real time, there was much more of a personal investment than just creating a playlist in Spotify.

Goodness knows how many of these I happily filled with music over the years.

Spotify is perhaps a necessary evil, personally I use it for two reasons only. Either to sample artists I’ve been recommended, and to then buy their CD if I like them, or occasionally to play stuff I want to listen to, but I only do this if I already own the physical material. It’s relatively cheap, I suppose - £9.99 a month for Premium (which I won’t pay, so I’ll tolerate the ads, thanks) – but that is reflected in the insultingly small amounts that Spotify pay the artists. Not that they are alone, as the table of royalty rates below, shows.

In 2021, Spotify generated revenue of over €9.67 billion, up from €7.88 billion in the previous year, so their sponsorship deal with Barcelona, worth €340 million over five years won’t make much of a dent in their profits, but there again, neither do royalties.

Streaming sites royalties, pitifully small...

...so that this sort of sponsorship deal can be finaced.

Bands in the UK have been hit by a triple whammy in recent years. Derisory royalties from streaming services, Brexit, and now covid (the latter two have ripped the heart out of touring in Europe for most bands). I read recently of one musician who made more money from merchandise at the first live gig he had been able to play after lockdown than he had in the previous twelve months of streaming service royalties put together.

Income from merchandise is vital for many bands, and I tend to buy a t-shirt  when I go to a gig (hence I have a cupboard groaning at the seams with them). Sadly, even this income stream is being squeezed as many venues now charge bands a percentage of merchandise sales, and I’ve even heard of headline acts charging support acts for merchandise sales, which if true, is completely outrageous!

My preference for a physical copy of the music I listen to means I’ll only download if that is the only format available, and I’ll buy my CDs either direct from the band, or an outlet like Burning Shed or Inside Out before I go to Amazon or HMV, even if it means paying a couple of quid more.

I can understand the appeal of Spotify (I’m using it to listening to Luminol  from The Raven That Refused To Sing, by Steven Wilson as I type – but I do own the CD), but as recent events have proven with artists like Neil Young and Joni Mitchell removing their material from the platform, and the fact that some bands are not represented at all – Prince, The Beatles, Adele, and Coldplay among others – it’s not as comprehensive as a proper music collection, and never can be, and it’s so much more enjoyable to listen to music from a physical source.

No matter how listening to music evolves in the coming years, the joy of creating a mix-tape cassette and playing it in the car will never be beat, and that’s a fact.

"So long as it is safe to do so"

The introduction to The Highway Code says,” It is important that all road users are aware of The Highway Code and are considerate towards each other. This applies to pedestrians as much as to drivers and riders.”  While HGV drivers and car drivers will have read The Highway Code, horse riders and cyclists should have read it, and so too should have pedestrians, it is probably only the drivers of motor vehicles who actually have done so (and most only read it so far as was necessary in order to pass their driving test).

 

I’d go as far as to say that if you polled a random sample of a thousand non-drivers, you would be lucky to find ten who have actually read The Highway Code, even though everyone should be aware of it and abide by it.

Although The Highway Code is something that everyone has a vague awareness of, it doesn’t often come to the fore, except when there is some fundamental change, and fundamental change is what we have recently had.

Last weekend, a number of changes to The Highway Code came into force. There is now a Hierarchy of Road Users, ranked as follows:

1. Pedestrians
2.  Cyclists
3. Horse riders
4. Motorcyclists
5. Cars and taxis
6. Vans and minibuses
7. Large passenger vehicles or courier vehicles like buses and HGVs.

Fairly uncontroversial, that: Makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? Pedestrians are obviously the most vulnerable group of road users, although in some ways I’d think that horse riders are even more vulnerable than cyclists, after all a horse is unpredictable and its rider more exposed than a cyclist, but I guess that’s moot and a matter of opinion. This hierarchy may upset some cyclists however, as I’m sure we have all observed some who believe that they are the most important and entitled of road users.

 More contentious however, is the change in priority for pedestrians and drivers at junctions and zebra crossings. Drivers, motorcyclists, horse riders and cyclists should now give way to pedestrians crossing or waiting to cross a road into which or from which they are turning. Road users should also give way to pedestrians who want to use a zebra crossing. The previous rules were that pedestrians only had priority when they had actually started to cross the road.

I do hope that any cyclists who have become aware of these changes to The Highway Code take note and stop for pedestrians who want to cross the road, as I’m sure we’ve all experienced the cyclist whizzing past by a hair’s breadth as we cross on a zebra crossing. It would also be nice if cyclists refrained from cycling on pavements, except where mixed use is allowed, and where that is the case, give priority to pedestrians; that would be a novelty.

Naturally the change that requires motorists entering or leaving a side road to give way to pedestrians waiting to cross has provoked many people to voice the opinion that if a motorist turns into a side road and has to stop sharply to allow a pedestrian to cross, they are in danger of being rear-ended by a vehicle that may have followed them round the corner, and thus this new rule may cause more accidents than it prevents. That was my immediate thought on learning of the change, but I think (and hope) that the problem has been overstated.

 

One of the things about driving, or riding a bike, or simply being a pedestrian, is that our behaviour is ingrained; changing how we behave will take time, hence I’m inclined to think that there will not be vast numbers of pedestrians modifying their behaviour and stepping out into the road with the expectation that motorists will simply stop for them. I’d better caveat that though, since in my experience (and probably yours if you are also a car driver), there is, and has always been, a risk that a pedestrian will blithely step off the pavement and into the road and expect motorists to have predicted this and act accordingly.

Anyone who has driven for any length of time will have quickly reached the conclusion that every other road user is an idiot, likely to do something unpredictable and dangerous at any time, and that it is therefore your responsibility to be aware of that, to predict what they will do, and take the necessary action to prevent an accident. Having said that, I am of course not immune from making errors of judgement on the road, and when I do, other road users may mistake those for being dangerous or unthinking, even though I’m not,

If there’s one change I can certainly get behind, it is the one that bans the use of mobile phones for any purpose. The use of mobile phones for calling or texting was banned in December 2003, but as the number of functions on smartphones grew, this created a loophole as things like scrolling through social media, or taking pictures or videos were not expressly forbidden. Now, use of any mobile device is banned, except for hands free phone calls. Given how often I see other motorists looking down at their phones, engrossed by them and not paying any attention to the road, this can only be a good thing – assuming anyone takes any notice of it.

The Highway Code changes received remarkably little publicity until about a week before they came into force, and when they did appear on newspaper websites they were treated somewhat sensationally. Take this clickbaity headline from the Evening Standard:

 

Referring to the so-called Dutch Reach, in which a driver – or passenger for that matter – opens their car door with their hand furthest from the handle, the paper implies that failure to do so will automatically result in a fine, which is blatantly untrue. It is important to read exactly what The Highway Code says, which is:

 

The purpose of this is to make anyone opening a car door more likely to see a cyclist or motorcyclist and avoid them either riding into the door, or swerving to avoid it. Even before the change it was and offence to open a car door so as to cause injury, punishable by a maximum fine of £1,000 but that doesn’t make such a sensational headline.

While some people have reasonably sounded a note of caution about the changes to The Highway Code - there has been some hysteria in the media, as the Standard headline proved - but what it all boils down to is taking the rules and applying the caveat that appears in more than one place within the Code, which is that whatever you do, you should do it only “if it is safe to do so.”

The last couple of years of covid have proven that British common sense, so often praised by our politicians, is often in short supply, but The Highway Code is largely based on common sense, and if all road users were to apply it a little more, be more considerate to other road users, and apply the “if it is safe to do so” caveat a little more, the roads would be a much safer place. I’ll not hold my breath.