5 Old School Music Technologies I Miss
A theme that came up in my Why Pilgrim’s Bookshelf? post that will probably resurface quite a bit is a looking back at how things used to be. Yes, there’s some nostalgia mixed in there, but a lot of it is a mourning of how we’ve traded humanity for ease. As a musician, I have watched an entire industry get turned upside down by technology. While there’s a lot to like about making music in 2026, there’s a lot I miss about how music was made and listened to back in the day. I’ve compiled a little list of some technologies I miss. Maybe some of these will resonate with you as well.
(Surprisingly) not on the list – vinyl albums
For people just a few years older than me, people who listened to vinyl as teenagers, there is probably a lot of nostalgia for this format. Not me. While I spent the first 8 years or so of my life listening to albums on vinyl, I didn’t like vinyl albums at all. They were big. They were bulky. You couldn’t play them in your car. They scratched. They warped when not stored properly. I got in trouble a lot because I didn’t handle vinyl albums with care and respect. I do have a newfound appreciation for vinyl. I will talk about that in its own separate post.
- Cassettes
I got a cassette boombox as a gift when I was about 8 years old, and it was nothing short of life-changing. With the advent of the cassette, I wasn’t passively listening to music anymore. I was part of the creative process. I could make my own mixtapes. With a built-in microphone, I started recording myself. Later, when I started playing guitar, I recorded little instrumental ideas. I didn’t realize it at the time, but what I was doing was writing songs. Years later, I found one of those guitar recordings and wrote lyrics to it. That song ended up winning an award.
OK to be fair, as much nostalgia I have with the cassette, it is a pretty horrible format. The sound quality got noticeably worse after a few dozen listens. The tape would get tangled up and you would have to get a pencil out and try to fix it. There’s been a small fad around collecting cassettes over the last few years, and it leaves me scratching my head.
2. MiniDiscs
While I loved cassettes at the time but have since moved on, I have a special place in my heart for the MiniDisc. MiniDiscs featured the same kind of DIY quality as cassettes but in a digital format. For a brief but glorious time from about 1999-2003, MiniDiscs were my primary creative outlet. I had a little Sony MiniDisc Walkman and a digital lapel mic. Yes, I owned a little cassette 4 track studio, but I loved the immediacy of the MiniDisc setup. I would record myself jamming and turn the ideas into songs. I would take the MiniDisc to band rehearsals and record rough versions of Third Day works in progress. And I may or may not have snuck my MiniDisc recorder into a few concerts during that time. The MiniDisc was the perfect technology at exactly the wrong time. As the MP3 format started to take over, people were more interested in iPods, so the MiniDisc died out pretty quickly. The iPhone, with its portability and different apps to do different things handles everything that I was able to do then, but something is still missing. I’ve never quite been able to capture the magic in quite the same way again. While my nostalgia for cassettes is mostly sentimental, I still think the MiniDisc was onto something.
3. The iPod
I remember where I was the first time I heard about the iPod. Third Day was doing a radio interview in anticipation of our Come Together album, when Tai pulled up an article about the iPod on his laptop. I was probably more excited than I was getting that cassette boombox for my birthday. While the prospect of having 1000 songs in my pocket felt limitless, there still was a ceiling to how much music was available to me. And the songs on my iPod were mine. It feels to me like we have traded ownership, both literal and emotional, for access. And as amazing as it is to be able to pull up just about any song on demand using Spotify or Apple Music, I had an appreciation for music that I think has since been lost. R.E.M. was my favorite band in high school, but I only owned about half of their albums. But the ones I did own felt like my music. The limits of the iPod didn’t diminish my love of music – they deepened it.
4. Music Magazines
A recurring question my wife and I get asked by our kids is some version of “What did y’all do before you had X?” Before I had the internet in my pocket, one big way I would fill all those little gaps of time throughout the day was by reading magazines. When I was in high school, I had all the latest issues of several guitar magazines laying around. I would read about how my favorite players learned to play guitar, and what their approaches to songwriting and soloing were. Every magazine also included transcriptions to popular guitar songs. Being 100% honest – I think modern technology has made learning guitar so much simpler. But just because something is simpler doesn’t make it easy. And back then you had to put in a lot of effort to learn the guitar. Today’s students have the ease of access, but I’m not sure they put in the same amount of effort.
When I was in my late teens and early twenties, I was inspired less by guitar players and more by discovering new music. I couldn’t wait to get the latest copy of Spin, Rolling Stone, or CCM. Each issue was like a glimpse into the future as they would review brand new albums by my favorite artists, many of which hadn’t even been released yet. So I had a sense of anticipation leading up to each new issue hitting the stands. And there was a natural curation of new music that happened. Instead of being told by an algorithm exactly what albums I would like, each issue introduced me to favorite artists I didn’t even know existed. The process was slower and the discovery felt less efficient, but somehow it felt more magical.
5. Record Stores
Record stores were one of the few places where music fans could gather without actually gathering. You would go to the record store and there would be other people there. You may or may not actually say anything to them, but there was a lot to be said for realizing that there were others who were into the same music as you. Back when new releases came out on Tuesdays, a lot of record stores would stay open past midnight on Monday nights, and that became a weekly ritual for me. As excited as I would be for the U2 or R.E.M. album I sacrificed some sleep to purchase, I was also intrigued by the new releases others had stayed up to get. They also used to sell concert tickets at the record store. I’ll never forget being in Turtle’s Records and Tapes in Mableton, Georgia when an excited store clerk blurted out “They just released U2 tickets!” I was in the right place at the right time, and ended up going to the ZooTV tour, which changed my life.
The cool thing about record stores, unlike some of these other technologies, is that they’re still there. They’re not as ubiquitous as they once were, but they’re still places where discovery happens the old-fashioned way: through conversations, recommendations, and happy accidents.
So those are just a few old school technologies I miss. On second thought, maybe it’s not the technologies themselves that I miss. I certainly can live without the tangled cassette tape or looking for MiniDiscs in the couch cushions. Maybe what I miss aren’t the technologies themselves, but the very human qualities they brought out in us. The participation with cassettes and the two way conversation they created. The creativity of a MiniDisc and a microphone. The ownership of music – both real and emotional – through an iPod. The anticipation of new songs and new stories through music magazines. And, maybe most of all, the kind of community that can only happen at a local record store. The challenge now isn’t resurrecting old technology or even finding new technologies to replace it. It’s about finding modern ways to cultivate those same human qualities.