In 1971 the Fisher-Price Change-A-Record Music Box was introduced for those toddlers looking to spin some wax plastic. It came with five not-long-playing discs that included such child chart toppers such as “Humpty Dumpty,” “Jack and Jill” and “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.” There is a slot in the music box itself to hold the discs. Not only in order to keep things tidy, but because those five discs were, well, the five discs.
Fast forward about 30 years and there was the HitClips digital music player from Tiger Electronics. Plug a cartridge into the device and get 60 seconds of audio from performers ranging from 3 Doors Down to Madonna, from Britney to Justin. Within a few years the cartridges contained 120 seconds of lo-fi music.
Then as we become more contemporary there is the Lego VIDIYO system that allows the creation of music with its proprietary collection of “12 Bandmates, 6 BeatBoxes and over 90 BeatBits to collect.”
And bringing it to now, there is the Donda Stem Player from Yeezy Tech + Kano. This is not to suggest that it is like any of the above in any sense beyond that it is something that it is an alternative means by which music can be obtained and in this case, modified to fit your tastes. There does seem to be a technological imperative that goes back to 1971, but in the case of the Stem Player there is not a limitation of what can be deployed; it accommodates AAC, AIF, AIFF, ALAC, FLAC, M4A, MP3, MP4, WAV, and WAVE files, so it is not like the user would have to limit themselves to the music of Ye and potentially his compatriots (i.e., if there was a proprietary format that he shared with his friends).
