The alternative rock world survives Y2K with big changes on the horizon!

How The New Millenium Began In The Alternative Rock World

The Y2K scare at the end of 1999 - the fear that all computers would crash due to the 2 · digit year ending in "00" reverting back to the year 1900 - turned out to be much ado about nothing. That being said, the digital age and rise of the internet were bringing about a huge paradigm shift in the music world!

For decades during the 20th century, the traditional system for listening to, distributing, and purchasing one's favorite music remained intact. Radio stations mostly held the role of playing new songs and albums, and repeating the most popular to promote them to the public. Record stores sold the physical copies of music - whether tradional records, 8 · track or cassette tapes, or CD's - to the end customer. Also, by the 1980's, music videos became an important promotional tool, giving rise to cable/satellite TV networks such as MTV and VH1. By the dawn of the new millenium, that began to change drastically!

Websites such as Live365 not only made it possible to use the internet to transmit a traditional radio signal (streaming), but also gave way to online · only "radio" stations, ones that could stream over the internet without a radio tower. File sharing sites such as MusicMatch Jukebox and Napster made it possible to download your favorite music, store it on your PC, and listen to it via an app, rather than purchasing a physical copy. Also, since CD's were digital, one could "burn" a CD - copy the digital download onto a CD ROM - with one of these apps, although the legality of this practice is questionable at best.

Although radio, TV, and record shops were still the main means of popularizing music, their role would diminish greatly over the next five years. How so? Stay tuned...