Back when people had to sit in chairs to hear music.It occurred to me today that our entire experience of amplified music is less than a hundred years old. We are accustomed to thinking of music older than about twenty years as being “classic”, and older than forty years as “oldies”. The electric guitar has only really been an effective instrument for about sixty years. Compare that with the violin, which came into its own over five hundred years ago, or the flute, which is twenty-thousand years old. Vinyl albums were the dominant form for about seventy years, sandwiched between wax cylinders and CDs, which lasted about twenty years. Now we listen to music through these:Mmmm. High-fidelity.In a way it’s all been part of the same technological revolution. We don’t make much distinction between innovations that happened in 1200AD and 1300AD, and the rapid pace of change in the distribution of amplified music will one day seem like it happened in a blink. Once we converted music into electricity, turning it into binary code was almost instantaneous. As our culture has accelerated, so too has our production of nostalgia. We’re nostalgic for cassette tapes, for music and culture that are only a few years old. In the long-run, vinyl LPs will seem like whale-bone corsets.