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August 11, 2006
Cheap as Chips
It's not the grey hair and wrinkles that make us feel old. No, it's our kids and their unerring ability to remind us of our mortality with a mere sentence.
Little angels!
A few years ago I was dragging my youngest up to the shops.
"What are we going to Woollies for?" she asks, all innocence
"I want to buy a record" I reply
"What's a record?"
And there you have it. Not only are there no records any more but they're so obsolete as to be unheard of by anyone under the age of 25.
Even so, it took until today for me to give in completely to the lure of things digital and buy an MP3 player (yes, I know, I'm sooooo last week.) It really is cool though and I don't just mean the amazing technology that allows me to save several hundred songs on something the size and shape of a tampon; nor their almost indestructability but it's the price that does it for me.
The first single I ever bought (yes, vinyl) cost 45p - that's decimal by the way, I'm not THAT old - which would be a little less than the cost of three bags of chips. There was a potato famine in Ireland in about 1977 which caused the cost of chips to literally double overnight which is why the price of chips, of all things, sticks out in my mind and I tend to measure everything by them even today.
So by the time CD singles hit the shops, we were looking at around £2.95 per, which, by then, was maybe slightly more than three bags worth. OK, a slight increase but things are keeping steady at around three portions per song......
Gnarls Barkley's Crazy broke all records recently by becoming the first to hit the top of the charts through downloads alone - it reached number 1 before it was even released on CD. So, assuming one downloads legally (as I do because I get £5 worth of free downloads every month from my mobile phone network), it now costs just 99p per song, less than the cost of ONE measly bag of jockey's whips. Cutting out all the physical aspects of producing a "record" has smashed the price to about a third of what it was five years ago, great news for us consumers eh? Now that's what I call music!
Posted by lilliebet at August 11, 2006 09:16 PM
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Comments
and with some of the songs, too, you can throw up about three bags of chips in the time it takes you to decipher what the friggin song is about
Posted by: Bill Gray at August 12, 2006 02:44 AM
45p?? Pah!! You youngsters don't know the true value of money.
My first single cost 6s 8d (34p to you). But EPs (remember them?) were better value - around 65p for 4 tracks. And the music was better than this modern rubbish!
Now, let's put a new wax cylinder on my Edison Phonograph ...
Posted by: Mister2 at August 12, 2006 08:11 AM
Ah yes, records.
I still have a few laying around but nothing to play them on. Maybe I'll sell them on E-bay, get a little extra cash to pay the lad's university tuition.
Posted by: OldGuy at August 14, 2006 03:47 PM