Now That’s What I Call…

Diary date: 23rd February, 1986

Having never been much of a shopper, it’s rare for my diary to mention things I may have bought at the time. But I made an exception on this date in 1986 and recorded with great excitement that I had belatedly added the cassettes of “Now That’s What I Call Music 3” to the others in my collection. For obvious reasons, I’m going to ignore the fact that the series has just reached number 87.

At the time, ‘Now!‘ felt ridiculously revolutionary. Companies like K-Tel and Ronco had been advertising and releasing ‘Various Artists’ compilations since the 70’s, but the tracks they had access to meant that you largely bought the records for the sake of two or three songs – or that you were buying material that already felt dated.

‘Now!’ was the first time two major labels – EMI and Virgin – had joined forces, and the result was a track list that was much more representative of the charts at the time. Not only that, but a combination of slick operations and genuine enthusiasm seemed to turn around each new ‘Now!’ more and more quickly. We started buying them as relatively representative of current music rather than out of a sense of retrospective nostalgia.

The other advantage of ‘Now!’ was the instant boost that it gave your mix tapes. Having previously spent hours on Sunday evenings with a microphone up against the radio – making excruciatingly poor quality recordings of Radio 1‘s chart show – ‘Now!’ gave you both high quality and a half-decent choice. Songs you hadn’t liked first time around were suddenly more appealing just because they were easily available.

With its numerous spin-offs – genre-specific editions, computer games, karaoke, quizzes, retrospectives, even its own TV channel – and its ability to react to market and technological change, ‘Now!’ has been a consistent thirty-year success story. The brand has adapted to survive the introduction of reproducible formats like CDs and MP3s, the advent of mass personal storage in the form of MP3 players, and the impact of peer-to-peer file sharing services such as Napster. As such, it stands in marked contrast to the music business as a whole, an industry which spent years in denial of the fact that – whether it was desirable or not – digital music distribution had changed everything.