A brief history of music in the office
Warning: this post contains reminiscing, nostalgia and faded memories.
When I began my career of sitting in a chair looking at a computer, in a horrible block in downtown Auckland, we would often have music playing in the office. But this was 1995. It wasn’t streamed, ripped or downloaded or even shared across a network. It was played through a portable CD player. Everyone would bring in their CDs and we’d have a regular batch from record companies for review. Wu-Tang Clan, Massive Attack, Garageland - hey, it was 1995.
The birth of the MP3
Then, in an unlikely shape of a hairy software developer, the future arrived - or at least a whiff of it. This guy had discovered you could download songs in a new format called MP3. The problem was, even with our office connection it was slow, the files were difficult to find, and when you did, they were usually for terrible American soft rock bands. We stuck to the office stereo.
A few years later, I’m working in London and Napster arrived like a giant, generous, music-loving teddy bear. All that music you never thought you needed, at just a search and a click away. No one thought too much about the impact on rights holders or artists. There just wasn’t that level of debate. Music was available, for free. And there was lots of it. The problem - on top of the growing understanding of illegality - was that the quality of files was often horrendous; not even the worst bands deserve to be encoded at 48kbit.
Another office, another format. The death of Napster, Kazaa et al forced an alternative approach, this time based on the ripping, storing and sharing of albums across a network. Again no one questioned the legality too much. After all, someone had actually bought the CD in the first place and on the axis of dangerous/risk-free and morally-bankrupt/ethically-sound, it felt to most to be a pretty guilt free, low-risk endeavour.
Share and stream
But then CDs? How old fashioned. Along came iTunes and the ability to share across your work network. But that too required you having the files on your machine. Much better to stream through last.fm and latterly, Spotify. We now share and create playlists together, recommend music to each other and fight over what goes over the office speakers (so some things never change).
Where next with all this? As I’ve said before on this blog, Spotify needs to introduce better community tools if it wants to be more than just a streaming service. The rating, ranking, sharing, recommending needs to be built in rather than something you have to do manually through other tools.
What’s guaranteed, the way we listen to music in our office right now is likely to seem archaic and longwinded in a year or two. I’m off to dust off that old Everything But The Girl CD.
boom box mania from Zadi Diaz on flickr
By Dom Waghorn, Head of User Engagement at 
