Tag Archives: headphones

Listening To Music In Solitary Confinement

PIxabay License

I was standing in a crowded subway car the other day, and by doing a quick scan I estimated that about 80% of my fellow riders had some sort of personal sound delivery system plugged into their ears. Inexpensive wired earphones are the majority of what most people tend to use, followed by those popular wireless short white sticks that seem to be growing out of ears, and then big, padded, sound-cancelling headphones.

Being a somewhat curious type who enjoys digging into data and statistics, I tried to gain access to Report Buyers‘ annual and exhaustive market survey on headphones, but they charge almost $4,000 to download it, and I assumed that even if I had a No Depression expense account, it probably would be denied anyway. So I searched for a brief summary from their latest report, from last year, which I found for free on PRNewswire. I learned that there are currently over 3,000 companies engaged in the earphone/headphone industry, with five companies capturing two-thirds of the market share value and 50% of unit sales. It’s a growth industry, with revenue predicted to exceed $20 billion by 2023.

Wired headphones are 59% of the market, the report says, with wireless obviously making up the balance. However, that is rapidly changing, with the trend now leaning toward noise-cancelling and smart devices that appeal to “highly social, tech-savvy, affluent and young consumers.” But anyway … enough numbers.

As a teenager and into my 20s, music consumption was often done in group settings. My friends would come together to partake in adult beverages and other mood enhancements while sharing with each other our latest music discoveries. It was a highly social setting that now seems rather lost in the wind. There were also endless hours of solo listening time alone in my room, with music pumped loudly through speakers that could be heard throughout the house. “Edward … turn that goddamn music down or else” was the nightly mantra from my parents.

In July 1979 we had a revolution. The Sony Walkman was introduced and marketed as the world’s first low-cost portable stereo, costing $150 in the US and branded as the Soundabout. They sold 50,000 units in two months, and while vinyl albums had the largest market share, utilizing magnetic cassette tape technology to create your own portable personal playlists was highly appealing. In thinking about modern popular music, I break it down chronologically like this: Sinatra in the ’40s, Elvis in the ’50s, The Beatles in the ’60s, arena rock in the ’70s, and Sony in the ’80s. It seems that popular culture was impacted in that decadent decade more by the delivery system than the actual music.

 

By 1984 the Walkman was replaced by the Discman, but Sony later changed the name to the CD Walkman. Whether it be tape or shiny discs, the portable personal music device became our preferred way of listening to music and was only further enhanced by digital technology and the introduction in 2001 of the first iPod. You could carry hundreds of albums in your pocket instead of just a handful of tapes or discs, and today, with streaming, you now have instant access to around 40,000,000 songs, give or take.

A quick aside: Spotify reported this week that 10,000,000 songs in its assortment have never been played, not even once.

What I wonder about most when I’m walking the streets of Manhattan or riding on a plane, train, or subway is what other people are listening to. Is it rap, rock, country, jazz, classical, blues, reggae, K-pop, J-pop, or hip-hop? A podcast, audio book, an album of choice, or a curated playlist? Sometimes I’m listening to something so amazing or special that I feel as if I want to scream out “Hey everybody, check this out!” and somehow magically broadcast it. Perhaps one day a digital streaming boombox will become the rage.

These days it doesn’t require much effort to find and read reviews or get recommendations from algorithms based on your music library. What’s missing is that personal connection we used to make when we could easily share enthusiastically with others. In using social media we do it with our meals, pets, clothes, vacations, politics, and yes, to some degree, music. But for a large part of the day, our hours awake are spent in our own plugged-in universe where we keep the stress and anxiety of a cacophonous world at bay. I don’t know if you have the same feeling as I do, but when it comes to music it just seems as if we’re each living in our own private Idaho.

This was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music’s website.

Many of my past columns, articles, and essays can be accessed here at my own site, therealeasyed.com. I also aggregate news and videos on both Flipboard and Facebook as The Real Easy Ed: Americana and Roots Music Daily. My Twitter handle is @therealeasyed and my email address is easyed@therealeasyed.com.

Headphones and Hair Loss

Pixabay License

Although my kids are grown and I no longer need to buy 200-count boxes of diapers or 10-pound bags of pancake batter mix, I’ve maintained my Costco membership and usually stop by every few months to pick up a few personal necessities and cat litter. Now, realizing that this may fall into the “too much information” zone, I’m going to nevertheless take a chance and share with you a recent revelation: I no longer need to buy shampoo. Ever. Again. Never. Done. It’s over.

With the exception of a small amount of gray fuzz on the sides that I shave off each morning, I’m now as bald as Yul Brenner, Telly Savalas, and that Australian dude from Midnight Oil. I know what you’re thinking … age, genes, and male sexual dihydrotestosterone. But hold your horses, Mister Ed. I suspect a musical connection.

Growing up in the ’50s and ’60s, I went from a crew cut to flat top, a buzz cut to a modified duck-tail pompadour. My three main style influences were Elvis Presley, Ricky Nelson, and actor Edd “Kookie” Byrnes, who played the parking valet on the television show 77 Sunset Strip and was always combing his hair. He even had a novelty song he did with Connie Stevens – “Kookie, Kookie Lend Me Your Comb” – that was a top ten hit. And while the most popular male hair products on the market back then were Brylcreem (“a little dab’ll do ya”) and Vitalis Hair Tonic, I opted for this one.

On Feb. 9, 1964, millions of American families sat around their black-and-white DuMont or Admiral television sets to watch four moptops appear for the first time on The Ed Sullivan Show. Modestly short by today’s standards, the way they wore and shook their hair when they sang was an aphrodisiac to teenage girls, and a few months later I had grown my hair out over my ears and collar, carried a cereal bowl down the street to the barber shop that I placed on top of my head as a guide, and got my first official Beatle cut.

By the Summer of Love in 1967, men’s hair flowed longer and longer. When the Byrds sang “so you wanna be a rock and roll star,” we all said “yeah yeah yeah” and let it grow despite the social constraints. We all dressed in costumes anyway, so the musicians and audience looked indistinguishable from each other. In England there were Mods, Rockers, and Teddy Boys, and in America it was simply greasers and hippies. My father didn’t speak to me for two years; we ate our meals separately at different times and I wasn’t allowed to get a driver’s license until I got a suitable haircut, which never happened.

After college my career goals were pretty simplistic: I wanted a job where I could always wear jeans, get stoned, and keep my hair long. That led to spending the next 35 years being a music business sales and marketing weasel, with a variety of long hairstyles often tied back into a ponytail. By the late ’90s it had morphed into – God save me – a mullet. I was wearing cowboy boots, drove a Ford Bronco, and was influenced by way too many trips to Nashville. It was the beginning of the end, and it broke my achy breaky heart.

By the time Y2K came rollin’ around, I was sporting a short, combed back Vic Damone thing with an ever-growing spot of skin in the back, and I began to ponder possible solutions. Toupees, hair weaves, restoration, ointments, plugs, and assorted medicinals were considered and tossed aside.

For reasons unknown, India seems to have become the hotbed of new treatments for baldness. There are lettuce and carrot juices to drink, shampoo made from milk and licorice, a process of wearing a paste of seeds and coconut oil in the sun for seven days and something called Binaural Beats, which are frequency modulators that encourage your hair follicles to grow when you listen to them. You can check it out here for free if you’d like, or follow another suggestion I just read about: maintain a regular bowel movement every day.

For the past few years I’ve been rockin’ the bald head with a close-cut Van Dyke beard that’s favored by Ultimate Fighting Champions, border security guards, and dudes who like to take their four-wheelers out into the California desert on weekends. Recently I thought that I finally discovered why I’m bald: it was my darn headphones. Seriously … I read it on the internet. In an article I found from Seventeen published last year, a “celebrity hairstylist” named Castillo claims that wearing over-the-ear headphones can rough up your hair strands and cause them to break off. Another credible authority called Hub Pages  speculates that “traction alopecia usually happens when there is a strain on the hair, so if your headset is pulling your hair or putting undue stress on your hair in some way, you could risk losing your hair to this method of hair loss.”

Don’t believe any of it. All these theories have been debunked by scientists. Mystery solved and this case is closed. Headphones, earbuds, or going to see live music will absolutely not cause your hair to fall out. On the other hand, it could lead to hearing loss. What? Huh? Did you just say something?

This article was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column over at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music.

Many of my past columns, articles, and essays can be accessed here at my own site, therealeasyed.com. I also aggregate news and videos on both Flipboard and Facebook as The Real Easy Ed: Americana and Roots Music Daily. My Twitter handle is @therealeasyed and my email address is easyed@therealeasyed.com.