Top Music Inventions from the Past 50 Years

If there’s one thing many of us can relate to, it’d be our love for music, whether it’s listening or playing. If you share a similar passion as I do for listening to whatever genre strikes your fancy, could you pick just one particular music-related invention that you’d consider to be the most important ever to be unveiled?

I’d personally vote for the MP3 file format, because although it wasn’t the first digital music format to hit the market, it was the one that really kicked-off some amazing things to come. Such things include MP3 players (iPod, Zune, Sansa, etc), digital music sharing/purchasing and overall, the ease of handling such files. Imagine if today we still had to deal with our hard-copy CDs just to listen to the music… insane!

Online tech magazine T3 picks their top ten music inventions, and not surprisingly, the MP3 format (and even Napster) is on there, but their first is still a good one… Sony’s Walkman. If you were alive in the 90’s and enjoyed music, chances are you owned one of these bulky players that are quite humorous to look at today. I’m not a fan of ultra-small MP3 players such as the iPod Nano, but I sure prefer it over a book-sized player!

Without a shadow of a doubt, Sony’s portable music box altered the way we think about and enjoy music forever, and such an achievement has got us thinking about all the other innovations in music that should be celebrated and revered with just as much gusto. Thus, we’ve compiled a list of the top ten innovations in music tech over the last 50 years. As Friedrich Nietzsche once said: “Life without music would be a mistake.”