The White Stripes finished off my era of tapes

One cold, hard lesson that has taken me almost half a century to learn is that you usually don't know when a very particular era in your life is over, not until long after it ends. 

I didn't know something was over when my mate Kaz gave me a cassette tape of this new band she'd heard called the White Stripes to listen to on the long drive home from Dunedin, sometime in 2002. I had no idea that this was the end of that part of my life when my mates made me tapes, and the end of the era when I used them to found new music. 

There was a time when I lived entirely on a musical diet of dubbed tapes. Albums cost at least $20 in 1980s money, but you could get a blank C-90 tape for three bucks, and fit two albums (or one double) on that. My music collection was extended out to whatever else my mates and their families were buying.

It all started with Pink Floyd, when my good friend Stephen gave me a copy of A Momentary Lapse of Reason, followed closely by The Wall. It would be a few more years before I properly got into the rest of the Floyd, but  I listened to those first two albums constantly on my alarm clock/tape player.

The little rectangles of hard plastic become pieces of personal history. Chris T made me tapes of all the Beatles albums he had and I still have the copy of Magical Mystery Tour/Get Back, and Chris W made me a lot of Queen, and I still have some of that too.

My favourites were the ones that were dubbed off an LP - digging on the hiss and crackle, and there are some albums that don't sound right to me when I listen to them digitally now, because they don't have the same random skips the taped copies had.

Kaz was right, by the way. The White Stripes sounded magnificent to my 2002 ears. It was the first two albums on one tape and it was revelatory and loud and I blasted that motherfucker on the three-hour drive home, and nobody ever made me a tape like that again. 

It all changed with file sharing over the internet, and now songs float down the fibre-optic cables, instead of being burned onto magnetic tape. I still get playlists, and I cling to physical media with the purchase of half a dozen CDs every year, but despite attempts to bring tapes back, I know nobody is introducing me to another band with  a shitty copy of something great. That drum beat faded out a long, long time ago.