So I was reading various think-pieces about the latest Apple press event when I ran across this article at The New Republic:

In these companies’ push to be the fabled Everything, interoperability is waning. Weeks after Facebook announced its acquisition of Instagram, Twitter cut off access to a feature allowing users to discover people on Instagram based on their Twitter “following” list. Months later, Instagram disabled Twitter Cards integration for Instagram content. Streaming music services, as is, are unfortunately siloed — one cannot, for instance, make a universal playlist that supports Rdio, Spotify, and Apple Music. It’s a situation without an analog equivalent: mixtapes work on any brand of cassette player.

But this “situation without an analog equivalent” is not in fact true. Greg Milner in his book Perfecting Sound Forever details the early years of the phonograph industry, which used to be “siloed” in just this way. Certain records would only play on their corresponding players. The technology progressed toward a world where playback devices played any kind of music.

(I don’t have the Milner in front of me; I lent it to a friend and without going over there midday and breaking and entering, I can’t give you an exact quotation. But I can feel it, man, that Milner details this somewhere in the first couple of chapters.)

So you can see today’s deliberate in-operability of current music streaming services as either a return to recorded music’s primordial warfare of formats or as another unfortunate but seemingly necessary evolutionary step of technological change, but you can’t say that it’s unprecedented. Instead, you could say that ever since music became a recorded artifact, we’ve wrestled with the format that record takes and how it gets controlled. The only escape from the headache of format would be a pure and total return to live music.