I'm not talking about the conformist Eisenhower Fifties, with its poodle skirts and tail fins. I'm talking about the rock & roll Fifties, when the music business got blown up and consumer electronics was born. Now, almost five decades later, we're seeing the music business getting blown up again, and the consumer electronics business right along with it. Except the first explosion is obvious while the second one isn't.

The music biz got blown up when Napster came along in 1999. Suddenly the whole world could start sharing their music over the Net, and the industry hardly knew what to do, other than sue the crap out of everybody (and thank their lobbyists for pounding the DMCA through Congress in 1998).

The consumer electronics biz got blown up with the introduction of the iPod. The difference, of course, is that the consumer electronics industry doesn't know what's happened yet. They think the iPod is just another device. Creative Labs alone has eleven products competing in the same category <http://www.creative.com/products/welcome.asp?cat=3>. When I was at CES in Las Vegas last month, I thought the same thing, especially when I saw the crowds of people around the Creative booth, hankering for a gander at all the new goods. In fact, I didn't see the explosive significance of the iPod until my friend Kurt Starsinic pulled one out of his bag at Linux World Expo.

What blew my mind wasn't that Kurt had one of the things. I've seen plenty of hackers with iPods. It was that he pulled the unit from his bag when we started talking about radio. "I don't listen to music on the radio any more", he said. "I listen on one of these." Suddenly my mind went back to the 1950s. I looked at Kurt's iPod and remembered what Sony did to popularize the transistor radio, and to invent the consumer electronics business along the way.

Sony didn't invent the first transistor radio. The Regency TR-1 came out in late 1954. Others followed from Zenith (the still-outstanding Royal 500), RCA, Emerson and GE. The others were all bigger, however. What made the Regency distinctive was its shirt-pocket size. That was the sweet spot for Sony, which hit the jackpot in 1957 with the TR-63, the first "pocketable" transistor radio from the company. About 100,000 Regency TR-1s were sold. The Sony TR-63, TR-610 and TR-620 sold in the hundreds of thousands. Some interesting sources on all this:

• Regency TR-1 history, on its golden anniversary <http://people.msoe.edu/~reyer/regency/>
• Texas Instruments' role <http://home1.gte.net/dpies/regencytr1/TI-Transistor_Radio_Links.html>
• Transistor radio history <http://www.etedeschi.ndirect.co.uk/tr.radio.history.htm>
• Early Sony transistor radios <http://www.etedeschi.ndirect.co.uk/early.sony.htm>
• Sony TR-610 and its sisters <http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Atrium/1031/trans/cool/3Sonys.html>
• Zenith Royal 500 <http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Atrium/1031/trans/US/1azRoyal500s.html>
• Galaxy of Transistor Radios <http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Atrium/1031/trans/1trans.html>

What made Sony distinctive wasn't just that it made and marketed a good radio, but that it created most of its own parts as well. It had to, since everybody else was still trying to wedge parts from nonportable machines into their own portables. (So, while the Regency ran on an odd 20+ volt battery, Sony made a system that ran on a common little 9-volt battery.) By fabbing so many of their components, and by selling quality products at good prices -- and then by branching out into other product lines -- Sony was the prime mover behind the Japanese-led consumer electronics revolution. The most distinctive aspect of that revolution was the high values companies like Sony placed on portability and involvement with popular culture.

It's easy to forget that, before the transistor radio, you had to do your radio listening at home or in a car. The transistor radio brought a huge increase in radio listening, especially among young people. Those increases were not just in the total number of hours spent, but also in the variety of music heard. Back in those days, rock & roll was a lifesaver to stations with second- and third- tier signals. So many come to mind... WIND in Chicago, WMCA and WINS in New York, WMEX in Boston, KRLA and KFWB in Los Angeles, KYA and KEWB in San Francisco, KSJO in San Jose, WAIR in Winston-Salem, WOLF in Syracuse, WKIX in Raleigh, KLIF in Dallas, WDGY in Minneapolis, WXYZ in Detroit, KOIL in Omaha, KROY in Sacramento, KQV in Pittsburgh, WEAM in Washington.... I can name dozens more from memory.

All these stations were staffed with disc jockeys who were connoisseurs of their music and deeply involved in their communities. These were the guys who emceed high school sock hops and introduced local garage bands to record labels.

The production of music also expanded enormously as countless new record labels helped create a whole new record industry. <http://koti.mbnet.fi/wdd/labels.htm>

Over time, of course, the industries consolidated, and the whole mess turned into what Joni Mitchell called "the star maker machinery behind the popular song." By the time the Net came along, disc jockeys were just voices, and radio had become a system for pumping stars chosen by Hollywood's music machines.

Today celebrity itself is a manufactured commodity, across all the mass media. Look at the newsstands or surf through the TV channels and you'll see the same sluice, coming down the tubes that run from mass production through mass media to mass consumption.

When I look at iPod and iTunes -- especially the iTunes record store, selling more than $30 million in music, so far -- I see those tubes getting replaced. And not just by Apple. Inevitably, there will be other intermediaries, as first sources and final customers start seeking efficient ways of relating and doing business.

What matters is what happens to the supply side of the market. In my report on Macworld, New Economy Hack: Turning Consumers Into Producers <http://linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=7345>, I said Steve Jobs and Apple were using free (as in beer) multimedia authoring products (iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD and GarageBand) to turn consumers into producers, redistributing market power from the few to the many. GarageBand is the latest addition to that suite. How radical is it? Here's my friend Dave Pentecost, a musician, urban homesteader and film producer from New York: