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.