One of the best and most important presents I ever received from my parents was a Sony cassette radio and recorder for Christmas in 1995.

The Sony CFM-10 was rather simplistic, its sound quality was adequate — but its redeeming feature to me was its ability to record straight from the radio to a cassette tape.

My parents had one stipulation with that device: Absolutely no using it after bedtime, which at that point in my life was 9 p.m. Harsh, I thought, but rules are rules — and rules are made to be broken, right?

I broke that rule good and well when I listened to our local Longview, Washington Top 40 radio station, KLYK Magic 105.5, when suddenly a track came on that I would never forget.

In a west end town, a dead end world
The east end boys and west end girls
In a west end town, a dead end world
The east end boys and west end girls
West end girls

I threw in a glorious recordable cassette tape, and I swore I fumbled around with it because my mom asked me all the way from the living room (remember: to a 12-year-old kid, our house was pretty decent-sized) what I was doing. “Nothing” was my token reply, then I popped the tape in there, turned the radio all the way to its lowest audible volume and listened to the song.

You got a heart of glass or a heart of stone
Just you wait till I get you home…

Once the song ended, I played it back again and ensured the recording of the Pet Shop Boys’ 1985 hit “West End Girls” would be seared into my memory.

That was my method of discovering new music in 1996. Throw in a cassette tape, listen to the radio and record a song I thought was cool. It was piracy in its purest and arguably least-prosecutable form, and it was glorious.

It was glorious because I had absolutely no control over what I heard — for all I cared and knew, the music was beaming down to my bedroom randomly. I put my hope for good music in the hands of a daytime DJ and the nighttime syndicated programming that came from the East Coast and translated to the station on Longview’s 14th Avenue.

Things were about to change in a big way, however. See, in 1996, MP3 music files (music on your computer!!!) were just beginning to become popular, and just three years later, the most revolutionary software of its time — although simple in its execution — would take the online community by storm. Napster was released to the masses, file sharing ensued and I suddenly had copies of nearly every song I wanted on a computer I had built from spare parts.

Of course, Rainier, Oregon in 1999 was still on the outer fringes of the rapid advance of technology, meaning we had to download anything from the Internet over a 56K modem. But the capability to listen to and share music digitally was revolutionized, and I enjoyed every minute of it with Napster and Winamp.

Who doesn’t remember the Winamp intro song, by the way?

As if having music on your computer wasn’t awesome enough, I would blow copious amounts of cash and buy CDs that I could “burn” said music onto. Hey, if I couldn’t share my pirated DJ mixes with all my Rainier friends over Napster, I could sure burn them a CD and exchange it with them in a secret handshake at the science hall in Rainier High School.

Everything came to a head my junior year of high school when my friend Paul showed me some software called Sonic Foundry ACID, a digital audio workstation in which you could essentially take sounds, loop them and even plug a keyboard in and create your very own music.

RAD. I remember getting a copy of it somehow, making beats and Chicago house-styled tracks that proved very unpopular with my peers. But hey, Daft Punk was becoming popular in 2001 — and it wouldn’t be long before I would try to recreate the hook from their track “One More Time” in my own bedroom, much to the chagrin and annoyance of my parents and brother (sorry, fam).

Pause for a second: Whoa, someone discovered how Daft Punk did their thing a few years ago. Whoever knew a track named “More Spell on You” by Eddie Johns was the source of inspiration for “One More Time”? Pretty clear sample, anyway:

Then in November 2001, my senior year of high school, much of the civilized world was abuzz about this new digital audio player called the iPod. Apparently you could take the same music you had on your computer and put it on this device, take it anywhere and play it through the headphone jack. Portable digital music without CDs? Brilliant!

Of course, no one in Rainier had an iPod the first year it was released (correct me if I’m wrong, high school classmates), so I never utilized one until early 2003. That’s partly due to me going into the Air Force and leaving civilization behind for a time, but also because iPods were expensive then. Ten gigabytes of music was a LOT OF MUSIC then.

Early 2003 would bring about the time that would revolutionize the entire music industry. In April, the death knell sounded for chain stores that sold CDs like crazy, as Apple’s iTunes software introduced a digital store of its own. The idea was awesome, and you could shop right from the comfort of your desk and chair. Only 200,000 or so songs were available then, but I don’t think anyone could have predicted how large the service would grow, or how quickly mobile devices would come to the forefront of our culture.

Ten years after iTunes’ initial release, more than 25 billion (read: 25,000,000,000) songs have been sold through the iTunes Store, and the service offers TV shows, movies, etc. that we can all watch on these tiny screens in the palm of our hands.

This is all occurring 17 years after I first popped in that cassette to record “West End Girls” by the Pet Shop Boys. Musical discovery then was magical; today all we need to do is open the iTunes Store — or for many, better yet, open Pandora or Spotify and check the Radio function to find music tailor-made to one’s taste.

As the tech world has made music discovery easier and brought an endless stream of content to us literally wherever we can get a cellular connection with a mobile device, it has forcefully closed shut an era in which music discovery was sacred simply because the listener had no control over how they found something new and enjoyable. Instead of finding music one enjoyed by chance, one can in effect get an endless radio station of their own tastes with the entry of a search term.

That’s fascinating, and I bid the iTunes Store a happy 10th birthday — but really, there’s a macabre nature to it. I wish I could bring out that old radio, turn the dial to Magic 105 and pop in another cassette. The East End boys and West End girls are calling once again.