Broadcasting and copyrights then and now.

Musicians (pop stars mainly) are complaining of lost revenue, due to their music being downloaded from the Internet, but copying music is nothing new, as pop songs were recorded onto tapes during radio broadcasts in my day.

To try and counteract these measures, Disc Jockeys were either told to talk over the start of the songs, and cut short the endings, or maybe it was the Disc Jockeys collaborating with the artists to safeguard their copyrights.

Either way it was a complete nuisance when we were recording the songs, but it never stopped us, and if you were sitting playing your tapes in the car with the window open, people walking past could never be sure if it was the radio or the tape deck that was playing the music if, on recording we never pressed the stop button before the DJs voices could be heard. It was all a matter of timing, and if you were willing to put up with the DJs voice, then it didn't really matter what was being said over the music as long as we had the main part of the song blaring for all to hear.

DJs still talk over the songs they play, but it wasn't always that way, so it's thanks to my generation that we still have to put up with their gibbering even though tape decks are almost a thing of the past.
I say almost, as I still copy some songs from the radio, and play the tapes on an old player I have at home, but I can no longer go to the beach, open a window and blast out the top ten from the comfort of my car on tapes I made up, as it only has a CD player, and although the car is only four years old, the said CD player is all but out of date already, before I even got round to making any discs.

The pop stars of today are facing the same problems as the stars of old, only this time the Internet does more damage, so I do sympathise with them, although they still make enough money to keep the wolves from the door, as did the stars of yesteryear.

I have no wish now, to copy in any way the songs that adorn the charts these days, as I think the old ones are the best, and I have already copied all of the the ones that I wanted.
There are a few good songs still coming from this generation but they are few and far between, so I'll leave all the copying to the younger ones, and let them worry about copyrights, but I am sure of one thing, no matter how many new ways of transmitting music comes along, and no matter how they try to safeguard it, someone will always come up with a way to overcome it.

Hopefully the new ways of broadcasting will provide us with a way of listening to the radio without all the needless banter over the music from the DJs, and we can go back to the days of old when you sat down to listen to the radio, and heard all of the songs that were played, then got the dedications for the next song from the more subdued DJs.