Streaming is not the way forward; ownership is
At least for as long as we live in a Capitalist society. Ya know.
I may be an adult, and (at the risk of sounding much older than I am) certainly I don’t resonate with some of the interests or experiences of “the youths today”,[1] but I’m still fairly young. That’s not an attempt at a humble brag, of course; rather, I mean to draw attention to the fact that the particular time in which I grew up was interesting, from an ownership of property perspective.
How it used to be (from someone who barely experienced it)
You must forgive me that the oldest technology I can think of was when cassette tapes existed alongside CDs, and VHS tapes were being phased out in favour of DVDs (but still very much around). I never experienced the alternative, prior technologies with such odd implementations as the ‘MiniDisc’. Even so, however, the point stands that when I was growing up as a child, we owned the media we consumed, generally speaking: watching a movie on the boxy TV set involved retrieving the VHS, or for much more of the time that I can remember, DVD from the collection and physically playing it back.
This had — and still has — its drawbacks, of course: should the DVD get scratched, that can render the movie unplayable, and now you’re out of pocket (and can’t watch it if that’s what you planned to do!); if you’re away from home you can’t watch any of those movies, since you probably didn’t bring your entire collection with you (or have a player with which to read the discs in the first place); and the quality of DVDs especially certainly leaves a lot to be desired[2]. Surely there are further issues, too, but that’s not the point of this post.
On counter, the upshot of this ownership was that you were not beholden to a random company’s whims or legal obligations: if Amazon decided they didn’t like 1984, they could hardly come around to your house and demand you return it (indeed, such an attempt would be illegal in the UK); likewise, when licensing agreements expired between publishers that wouldn’t affect your physical media, as my DVD copies of Black Butler — published in the UK by a company that appears to simply not be functioning anymore — can attest. As long as you owned your media, you had a reasonable guarantee of continuing to own that media.
How it is now
Back around 2014, in High School[3], I was — as many teens do — getting into music and developing my own taste: not completely removed from the music I’d grown up around through my parents, but with some different directions (like the lack of rap in my library versus theirs, or the addition of heavier metal — such as nu metal — or more modern-specific genres like vocaloids). Such an effort was made substantially easier through not needing to actively look for music, nor did I have to go to the effort of buying CDs or having a hassle with playing music whilst waiting at school, for example: I used Google Play Music, so friends might suggest music, which I would then form an opinion of, and if I liked it I’d listen to it on my own through Google Play Music, thereby informing its algorithm and in turn discovering more music via its discovery mechanisms. This worked remarkably well for me through High School, particularly as — per the dynamics of this setup — all the music I did intend to listen to was on my platform of choice. I even outright bought some music through Play Music at the time, when it was something that I adored[4] and I had some spare pocket money.
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Defining a generation is a foolish task, as the cultural boundaries between one generation and the next are never so clear-cut, even where there is some level of agreement on aspects of it. A young Millenial will have a substantially different experience to an older Millenial, even if they’re considered of the same generation; and indeed, the fact that there are different year ranges to identify these generations depending on whom you ask exemplifies this. Ultimately, I don’t think it is useful to argue over whether I’m Millenial or Gen Z, nor whether I’m in a different generation to my brother or not; my experience was slightly different to his, and both our experiences are substantially different to our parents’, or that of our country’s current children’s. ↩
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Did you know that a DVD is, at best, specified to be 576p? For older media it’s then more likely to be interlaced, of course! Try playing that on a 4K TV… ↩
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The school system in the UK is, frankly, a nightmare when it comes to explaining what is what. The typical system — at the time I was attending school — in the North of England is rather streamlined, with progression through the years happening based on age (that is, in a slightly simplified view: regardless of performance): Primary School covers Reception (around the age of 5) through Key Stages 1 (years 1 and 2) and 2 (years 3 through 6), after which you would ‘graduate’ to attending a local High School (which covered Key Stage 3, culminating in GCSE — General Certificate of Secondary Education — exams at the end). You would then either go into training or attend college — which I won’t get into the intricacies of here — until 18, at which point you could choose what you wanted to do next (whether it be going to university, an apprenticeship, straight into work, or just becoming a NEET). When I say ‘High School’, it’s this format that I am referring to; note that this isn’t as simple as just a UK vs. US distinction, as whilst I’ve never personally been familiar with a ‘Middle School’, I am aware that some areas — particularly in the South — do have an intermediate School level (which, I believe, usually comprises — at least? — years 7 and 8 which I would ascribe to a High School). ↩
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I was diagnosed autistic pretty late — in year 9, which is remarkably late for a male ‘gifted’ child — so much of my subsequent discovery of neurodivergence and our quirks has been much more ‘in hindsight’ than really proactive. I’ve since observed that I have a very obsessive tendency when listening to music, where a specific melody, or line, or pairing in a song will “stick” and I’ll latch onto wanting to hear that specific bit over and over, so I’ll inevitably play the same track on repeat for a while. You’ll likely observe this sometimes on my ListenBrainz scrobble history (assuming it’s not just my scrobbler getting into a weird state, which has also happened before; I’ve cleaned up the instances I’m aware of that happening, though). These would end up being the kinds of tracks that I would fork over the money to keep, since I’d figure that if I listened to it that much I really liked the song, right? In hindsight, it’s not a reliable indicator: certainly I do enjoy those tracks — even today — but I’m not convinced it would end up being to a greater degree to other songs that I liked which didn’t trigger the same effect. ↩