Generations

So we find ourselves at January 6th before I've been able to compose my first blog entry of 2011. You can put that down to the arrival of my second son Milo, and the fact that any spare time I have had in the past few weeks has been profitably spent aimlessly staring at walls, wondering how our genes enable us to blank the memory of sleep deprivation endured at the arrival of our first children…

Milo's arrival has got me thinking about the differences he and his brother will see in their day-to-day worlds from what I and generations before have seen. It's tempting to think that we live in a time of unprecedented technological change, but is that really the case?

Music is an interesting case in point. When my grandfather was born, printed sheet music would have been the predominant form by which music was distributed. In his early lifetime, the shift was from paper to the 78 rpm gramophone record – something of a quantum leap. When my father was born (and he'll hate this being pointed out) 78s still ruled. However, in his early life the lp and single formats (33 and 45 rpm respectively) emerged, along with stereo recording and hi fi.

33s and 45s were familiar to me as a child, but my formative music years were on (audiophiles look away now) the compact cassette and latterly CD. I'm a bit later to fatherhood than either my dad or granddad, so there has been another format change in the past decade, with downloads and streaming replacing physical media. A CD will be as much of an ancient relic to my boys as set music of pop songs from the 1920s were to me.

So in some ways, the changes we are seeing are nothing new… Three generations of music-buying Ballantines have seen something similar happen. However what does seem to be more profound is the potential for democratisation that digital distribution allows, and the decreased latency compared with the former physical formats.

In my teens, along with a few friends, I dreamed of being able to release a record. Putting aside the lack of any decent material, the biggest barrier was in the costs involved in production and then pressing vinyl… prohibitive to us at the time (and probably no bad thing). For today's garage bands the combination of cheap authoring tools on commodity computers and the web and social networks mean that it is simple to release music globally at little or no cost, almost as soon as the music has been recorded.

These same effects are being seen in just about every communications medium. And this is what is going to make the world a potentially much more interesting place for Milo and his older brother.