File-sharing sites devoted to this kind of activity, such as MP3.com, Napster, etc., made music of all kinds (popular, classical, world music) instantly accessible to Internet users. (Still a relatively recent invention, in historical terms.) The MP3 allowed users to upload and download audio files far more quickly than with previous file types, which were much larger and could potentially take hours to process, compared to minutes, and eventually even seconds. One of the major catalysts for the development of the MP3 was the increasing availability of personal computers growing out of the 1980s, and especially the new presence of the Internet in mainstream society beginning in the mid-1990s. Also as part of the Digital Age, formats such as the CD (1982), and perhaps even more significantly, the MP3 file format (1995), have offered a greater level of portability and storage of music. While digital recordings had been in an ongoing stage of development since the 1980s, the sound quality, accessibility of the computer programs, and available techniques, improved drastically, and yielded far better results.

Creative software programs for music notation (even before Finale and Sibelius), and recording, editing, and production (ProTools, for example) offered new opportunities for amateur musicians to create sophisticated digital productions at home, using technology that was also in use in professional recording studios. Personal computers became more common in middleclass homes in the 1980s. Many of the technologies that we take for granted, because they are now such a permanent presence is our daily lives, are fairly recent inventions. Today, for our final new topic of the semester, we will be looking at some miscellaneous developments in the music industry over the past 30 years, that have absolutely transformed how music today is performed, produced, distributed, and how we, as music consumers, engage with it.

Stuttering song doo wop