Coffeehouse Junkie

Vintage audio technology still works. Found a stack of minidiscs from back in the day when I did radio.

Some minidiscs contain uncut, uncensored interviews with hard rock musicians from the late 1990s. Some minidiscs store alt rock music playlists. Some of the minidiscs hold dozens and dozens of radio stingers (five to ten second audio used to transition between songs or segments) and bumpers (ten to fifteen second audio featured station ID, show branding, music, or voiceover like “we’ll be right back” to avoid dead air or an abrupt cut or transition to top of the hour news). But the old tech still works!

For a few years in the late 1990s, the technology of recordable/playable minidiscs emerged with market growth opportunity that was quickly destroyed by the first generation Apple iPod. 60 to 80 minutes of audio on a minidisc versus 50 to 60 hours of audio on an iPod is not even a competition.

A first gen iPod holds a thousand songs. By comparison, back in the 1990s, a top 40 radio station had a catalog of 150 or more songs that they played 24 hours a day. An alternative rock radio station (like the one I was on) had a library of 300 to 500 songs. On one minidisc I curated a 12-song playlist that included three songs by Tsunami Bomb, three songs by Big In Japan, P.O.D., Temple of Rain, and Audio Karate. At the time, that musical selection meant enough for me to organize and store it on a minidisc. A thousand songs? That is too much to manage. Pick your 12 favorite songs and enjoy.

What am I going to do with these vintage audio and radio archives? The temptation is to place them online somewhere. But maybe it is better to leave what happened in the 1990s to stay in the 1990s.