How did you create your first playlist?

I had a transistor radio sitting next to a cassette recorder

I was reading a post by Amaya Lim on Substack called RecordStore, where she wrote about her first playlists. Her blogs are great btw if you are a music lover. She will likely introduce you to bands and artists you haven’t heard before, and it is always good to add new music to your list.

My first thoughts took me back to my little room on the first floor of my grandparent's home in Holland where I was living after my parents separated in New Zealand. I thought to myself, “I didn’t have playlists”, but when I thought back, I sort of did.

My uncle had loaned me a small transistor radio, not the smallest you can get, but perhaps the next size up. I also had a loan of a cassette player from a relative. I would listen to Radio Veronica and hope that the DJ would announce the songs before playing them, and then I would push down the play and record buttons, and try to pause or stop it again before the advertisements started. Sometimes I got an advertisement like the Brylcream ad, with a guy saying “Ik grebruik het weer”, or “I used it again”, followed by a girl saying “En ik blij toe”, which sort of says, “and I am glad”. Hey, that was 1970!

The playlists were bitsy, and not great, so I gave up recording them after a while. Even though Veronika was a pirate station where Payola might not have been a big factor, there was a lot of repetition of the Radio Veronica Top 40 hits, which back then were pretty awesome. I just didn’t have access to be able to choose what to listen to or when. I always enjoyed the Top 40 Countdown. If you were a child of the 70s, and beyond, check this out:

We didn’t have many records back then and most of them were of Dutch artists of the ‘Easy Listening’ variety that my grandmother and aunty would sing and dance to. A bit different from what’s on this list.

In later years with technology, playlists became easier. I owned a 4 track reel-to-reel tape recorder and recorded from records in stereo, which was cool. With some of the big tapes, I could get several hours of music on one tape.

In my early 20s, I had company cars as I was a sales rep, and they had cassette players in them. So I started recording records onto cassettes and bought lots of cassette albums of my favourite music for portability.

Working for a company that sold and installed two-way radios on Police Special motorbikes, I also had access to horn speakers and recycled radio cases, so I was one of the first people around with a cassette player and speaker on my motorcycles. That was fun.

In preparation for our wedding in 1984, I spent a couple of weeks of spare time, creating playlists for each phase of the wedding. There must have been at least 8 cassettes ranging from quiet, to dance music.

Later the CD ROM arrived, which was a game changer, because, again with company cars, which I have enjoyed for most of my working life, the new cars played MP3 CDs as well as ordinary CDs and you could get a huge number of tracks on a CD.

I still have loads of CD ROMS with MP3 collections by genres and artists, but I no longer have any need for them. I’ve thrown some away but also kept some for sentimental value.

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Be careful what you wish for

I used to be part of a great social media group called Buzznet, which was a close community, scattered around the world and is absolutely nothing like the site of the same name I see today. I can’t remember who it was, but back in the early 2000s I was talking to someone in the group about looking for MP3s and he said he would send me a DVD ROM with lots of song files.

I forgot all about it until one day a parcel arrived in the post from France with 7 DVDs of music files. I can’t remember how many music tracks there were, but it was in the thousands. It took me a couple of years to even listen to them all. There were some beauties in there, many I already had, but some great French artists and others who I became very fond of.

One of those artists is Lara Fabian. Check out this live performance of Adagio. Don’t just click on it and skip after the first couple of minutes, because the best is still to come.

Then we got Apple Music and I used their software to rip all of my CDs, so I could easily synch with my iPods.

Then, of course, came the iPhone and now instead of samplers I pay for the advertisement-free Spotify service, which I can stream from my phone to my home theatre, and the software service holds all my playlists in the cloud, including the #500 songs that go with this Substack are all there. I’m now teaching my 93-year-old mother how to use Spotify on her phone and she is amazed at how pretty much any artist or song she thinks of, is easy to find. It’s been a while since she played a record.

So in 2022, we still have playlists. Some of you might still use CD ROMs, Flashdrives, SD Cards, and other media to listen to. I have a Flash Drive in my sauna because I don’t want to take my mobile inside.

What’s your playlist story?