By Eunice Lim

Being one of the oldest art forms, music has entertained centuries of people through live performances, records, cassettes, Laserdiscs (LD), Compact Discs (CD), MiniDisc (MD) and today’s digital formats. From soothing our souls to lifting our spirits, empowering us to moving us to tears, music has an innate ability to stir all kinds of emotions within us. I grew up listening to children songs on cassettes, which I also found joy in rewinding the tapes with my tiny fingers.

Since then, listening to music became a pastime for me. It is something many of us do when we’re traveling to school, work or simply chilling out. Eventually, cassettes were replaced by CDs in the 90s. CD albums usually come with a booklet of lyrics, beautiful pictures of the singers/bands and sometimes, they even have awesome freebies to entice the fans or potential buyers. Then, CD player was the coolest gadget to have. I remembered the first time I received my first CD player, I couldn’t stop listening to music on it!

During this period, Internet was also beginning to take off with the mass and mIRC, an Internet Relay Chat client was a hit amongst the local youths. Suddenly, music was easily accessible and downloadable through mIRC channels and Napster, the pioneer of online music file sharing service created by Shawn Fanning. Although piracy went rampant then, the popularity of Napster sparked the awareness that such a service and distribution channel was going to be the next popular wave. Soon, Apple took on the dominance of digital music business with its iTunes and iPod business.

While some people like to use their electronic devices single-mindedly, others prefer to travel light and easy, which made mobile phones with music playback feature a perfect device to own. Nokia 1208, Nokia 2630 and Nokia 1650 were the first few Nokia devices that support music playback. However, due to the limited memory allocated, it was impossible to store a lot of songs on these mobile phones and this was definitely a bummer to many music lovers and heavy users out there. The demand for bigger memory space increased with time. Gradually, memory expandability was introduced and Nokia devices came with bigger internal memory too. And to satisfy the ever-growing power multimedia users, the current N96 has 16GB of internal storage, which can store up to 5000 songs!

With the increasing trend of people using their mobile devices to listen to music, Nokia extended its service to online music distribution with Nokia Music Store in August 2008. Catering to all PC and Nokia devices that support the WMA format, this is possibly the most convenient way to get the latest music anytime, anywhere – as long as you’re connected to the Internet. Besides, the upcoming “Comes with Music” package will be providing a one-year unlimited music download for Nokia devices such as XpressMusic and N-series. Combining this package with Nokia Music Store’s service, this is possibly the best way to combat music piracy too. Double hooray.

If you asked me, I personally prefer purchasing songs online than buying physical CD albums. To me, CDs tend to get misplaced easily and the jewel cases can take up a lot of space. After all, I no longer carry a cassette or CD player with me anymore. Buying and downloading songs online is not only cheaper and more convenient for most of us, but it also goes with the lifestyle we lead today.