The forgotten pleasures of analog media | Hacker News Reader

The forgotten pleasures of analog media

yalereview.org

89 pointsaxiomdata31670 comments

Another thing not mentioned is the fun in finding media itself.

I went out with a girl I met at a record store once, and I’ve met several musicians when I’m out buying music.

When you can get everything beamed directly to your house, you miss out on so many adventures. I imagine many marriages originated from chance encounters at Blockbuster.

Instead of some cool college student suggesting an old 80’s film, Netflix tells you to watch it’s new 50 million dollar movie. While I love the internet , the world feels less fun now. So many multi billion dollar companies nudging me in this direction or that direction…

>Instead of some cool college student suggesting an old 80’s film, Netflix tells you to watch it’s new 50 million dollar movie. While I love the internet , the world feels less fun now. So many multi billion dollar companies nudging me in this direction or that direction…

This is exactly what I haven't been able to put into words without sounding and feeling like a giant hipster douche. It's not about finding smaller, unknown songs/bands/films. It's about the experience of sharing.

I know that the guy at the record store has nothing invested in suggesting this weird little indie band to me outside of being a fan and wanting to spread the word. Whereas I know that Netflix is going to suggest to me what will keep me hooked and what they need to see a return on their investment.

The internet has 100% made the world less fun. More accessible, sure, but way less fun now that it's mostly corporate (or at least seems that way).

The internet has 100% made the world less fun. More accessible, sure, but way less fun now that it's mostly corporate (or at least seems that way).

The world, especially the media world, was always "mostly corporate", from the big 3 TV networks, big 4 record labels, big 5 movie studios, etc. The Internet brings independent media to you in a way that was never possible in the past. The record store still exists, and is experiencing a boom compared to aughts. Now, in addition to the guy there, you can get additional opinions/recommendations from across the world on message boards, twitter, blogs, wherever, too. Today, you can stream video content that no TV station would show, buy albums no label would press, etc.

>Now, in addition to the guy there, you can get additional opinions/recommendations from across the world on message boards, twitter, blogs, wherever, too.

I 100% agree with your first statements - the access is way better now than it was.

But this sentence is where I absolutely see the problem. Again, I could trust that guy to recommend music because he liked the music. Now, every blog, every tweet, every recommendation just feels gamed. It seems to me that astroturfing is just everywhere. It's impossible to escape, and it ruins the experience of finding new music.

Everything is for sale and it feels awful.

Everything is for sale... including the records the guy at the record store likes. To claim everything else is gamed/astroturfing because of your feeling is pretty disingenuous.

Except that 10 years ago, the guy at the record store was an unaffected college student and he wouldn't give a rats ass about whether his recommendation would increase or decrease sales.

In my opinion, the rise of paid bloggers was what ruined the internet for honest people everywhere.

Or he was the owner of the store trying to make a sale, or he was friends with the musicians and trying to make a sale. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Paid bloggers sounds awfully similar to the old payola scheme. It's really nothing new in the music industry...

A music blog with affiliate links and ads and SEO is very very different than a conversation with the guy at my local record store. To think they are more similar than different is preposterous.

I didn't say they were the same. Just because a blog as ads or affiliate links, that doesn't mean it's astroturfing or gamed. Of course, the ad filled blogs probably got their cue from mags like NME, Rolling Stone, etc.

I never was a record store patron - I did buy physical media (mostly CDs - and actually I still do, although nowadays I order them online), but it was in big electronics markets where the staff was less knowledgeable. But I have found another "recommendation engine" for music: when going to concerts of my favourite 90s bands (e.g. Garbage), I also give a listen to the back catalog of the opening act(s). This way, I have found a few hidden gems - of course these are pretty obscure artists (e.g. Du Blonde - https://www.dublonde.co.uk/music), but as long as I like the music, I don't care...

Plus that girl I met at the record store was very much real and not a bot.

I do what I can to try and reclaim my freedom, even if I can order junk from Amazon. I vastly prefer to support local retailers. This serves a couple of purposes, first, it keeps that kid working retail employed, second I might randomly find something else I need.

I might stop by a bar on the way back, I might met my next band mate.

On the other hand: I had basic Top 40-adjascent music available to me. Nothing impressive was to be had at Wal-Mart or Target. Target had better selection than the chain music store in the mall, wal-mart was out of the question due to censorship (they'd sell movies with strong language and sexual situations, but wouldn't sell music with the same).

I've never met anyone in a movie rental place.

I currently have a wide selection of music and can talk to folks about it if I want. I get recommended movies and shows through friends online.

I met my spouse playing a silly MMORPG some years back, and wound up moving to another country because of it.

In other words, for me, the world you describe is the one I actually found through the internet.

Let me guess: Ragnarok Online?

Oh, that would have been fancy. No, this was one of the multitudes of text-based games that were out some years back, most of which had the same basic layout and features. This one was Samurai themed, but I've seen plenty of other themes.

Things are different, but also the same (obviously record stores still exist for people who want to go). I've been buying records (and CDs) via mail order, interacting only with a catalog, for decades. More recently though, there are now message boards attached to some of these catalogs. I've made friends online (who I would've never run into at my record store) to go to a music festival with and gotten recommendations from fans, musicians and label owners alike without having to go to a store.

Whether you want to leave your house and go on an adventure, that's on you and blaming Netflix's algorithm is a copout. Even before streaming, mail order was always a way to buy stuff without interacting with people (or even just going to the store and checking out without talking to anyone) and corporate backed radio DJs & Columbia house-esque subscriptions were always telling people what to listen to, too. And, look, if you're really into something like music, you'll seek out a community around it, and I understand that you can be frustrated with streaming options, which are designed for mainstream/lowest common denominator appeal. I don't "get" music streaming services the same way I never really "got" popular radio, but I do get that most people are OK with just listening to whatever the (human or algorithm) DJ tells them to.

>I've been buying records (and CDs) via mail order, interacting only with a catalog, for decades.

Time Life Collection!

Enroll now, and receive 10 CDs for $0.01! <superdupertinyassfont>Just buy $x of over the next 12 months</superdupertinyassfont>

Spending entire days in used book/cd stores has previously been the sole reason I'd visit some towns. They've nearly all vanished, often replaced with hipster bars and coffee shops where everyone's buried in their personal mobile devices.

It's no longer worth even paying for the parking, which coincidentally also used to be free.

Agreed. In the digital realm, the closest I have ever come to the feeling of browsing at Waterloo records on 6th and Lamar in Austin with my brothers has been splurging on bandcamp fridays during the pandemic, posting my haul on ig, then also picking up whatever looks interesting in my friends’ hauls.

> Instead of some cool college student suggesting an old 80’s film, Netflix tells you to watch it’s new 50 million dollar movie. While I love the internet , the world feels less fun now.

Netflix isn't the internet. Those cool 80's films are still out there.

> I went out with a girl I met at a record store once

I went out with a girl I met on last.fm once.

Reminds me of the Hedonistic Treadmill - whatever your environment, your brain adapts as the baseline and everything slightly below it is now disappointing while everything above it slightly elating. Usually this concept is used to explain why lottery winners do not seem to be all that much happier than the rest of the populace, but it applies here to:

Whatever is required to get media is the normal: You build little rituals around it, you have tiny little traditions in the friend group.

For some guy this is "getting into the old family beater to drive to the VHS-rental", for another gal it's "the Netflix ba-doom sound while settling into the couch" and I am sure they both could write a nostalgic blog post about it 15 years later.

On the one hand, this is aligned with the articles premise that we maybe have not actually moved forward in an emotional sense, but I also like the other, maybe Stoic side of this - the outside world and its offers matter way less than what you make of it in your head and heart :)

In general, you adjust to what is available and what is relatively easy.

This is true in a lot of contexts. If some activity isn't available to you or is a big hassle--say you don't have enough room in your apartment to store some outdoor activity gear or a ready way to transport it--you probably just do something that's easier most of the time. And you probably adapt to that rather than banging your head against the wall.

>say you don't have enough room in your apartment

It's all good until you disagree with your roommate/SO on what fits into your apartment... then the head-wall-banging can be indefinite!

This is an interesting read and I find the author's observations rather relatable. Some of my friends really, really prefer streaming and that's great! But it never quite agreed with me for some of the reasons I think are given here. I often find that there's a tendency to endlessly navigate a streaming service just to find something to watch. Maybe it's an overabundance of choice or maybe its just that algorithms and infinitely scrollable pages are a dark pattern. Blu-rays, CD's, and vinyl make me more particular and emphatic with my choices. I don't put something on just to watch or have background, I usually pick something specifically because I want to watch it.

We (my partner and I) do enjoy streaming media to a degree, but I prefer physical like yourself. I also find a kind of (likely pretentious) comfort in having control over the media, as in knowing the version I am watching hasn't been edited or changed like airplane movies used to be.

In general though I recommend separating the acts of curating media (i.e finding it and cataloguing it) and watching or consuming it. I started doing this years back when RSS was a thing and I found myself doomscrolling through hundreds of articles, not able to remember what I had read (and sincerely enjoyed) a few hours earlier. I strongly recommend it to anyone who finds themself doing something similar.

Also unrelated, but Netflix's interface actively discourages searching for additional information on their content, as normally none of the titles, cast, etc, are text and highlightable/cut and pastable.

"I often find that there's a tendency to endlessly navigate a streaming service just to find something to watch."

I miss in person product discovery and wayfinding mechanisms, even if I know they themselves are (were?) curated (toy stores, record stores, book stores). I have diligently tried to adapt well to digital discovery, but it hasn't been the same for me. Part of it is haptic, but another part is that digital seems overwhelming. I also get discouraged when I know exactly what I want to find digitally and I'm given myriad other options except the one I want. I look forward to constant evolution in the space and I actually think that AR/VR scenarios can help there.

Yeah. I'm not sure it was a "good" use of time (whatever that means) but I do miss browsing book stores and record stores--especially used ones. I still do it from time to time but, to be honest, it's mostly a "for old time's sake" sort of thing. The music is almost certainly available streaming and there's an almost infinite number of books available for purchase/download (with reviews) online as well.

The "infinite browsing" still happened in physical stores though, of course, not quite to the same scale and it's a different sort of experience because you had to leave your house.

I more-or-less agree with the point in the article. Knowing you have less access to something can help make you more conscious about your decision.

The biggest problem with browsing at a music store is that the only way to guess what it sounded like was by looking at the song names, cover art, and which section it was in in the ridiculously imprecise categorization for the "genre" it was in. I spent way too much money on terrible music with this game.

With Spotify, I can actually find new music and artists, without going broke, and without relying on the, usually fairly limited, suggestions from others. I have zero interest in artificially limiting the music I'll be exposed to, just to make that limited, and potentially undesirable, selection seem better than it actually is. I love music. I definitely don't want to get stuck with a few albums on repeat.

I recently bought an old Technics cassette deck, identical to the one I had in the early 90s while on a retro computer hunt. It’s nice but not top of the range, but I’ve been blown away by the quality of the first generation recordings onto Type II cassettes. The Type I seem to be as meh as I remember them.

TASCAM has just announced the 424, the first new Type II cassette in years. Cobalt, not Chrome Dioxide, which I can only imagine was pretty environmentally unfriendly.

https://tascam.com/us/product/424/top

It doesn't even need to be physical media. I switched from buying CDs and ripping them to MP3, to just buying MP3, once I realised that the bit that I value most is simply having a finite music collection that I know well. I take my music collection with me by running a Plex server on a Raspberry Pi at home - some of it isn't available on streaming services. (A couple of albums aren't even available to buy any more, in any format.) I wouldn't say I know every single album in it like the back of my hand - but I'm at least familiar with them all, and that gives me a lot of satisfaction.

I do still use streaming services occasionally when I want something my library doesn't cover - say I'm really in the mood to explore UK grime music one day, or 90s dubstep the next. But I find it a very different experience to listening to old familiar songs.

I was just discussing this with my wife. I switched to streaming services out of convenience but I find that the collection of my 'liked music' is easily 1/10th of my old MP3 collection(160GB?). Since switching to streaming the number of artists I regularly listen to has dropped dramatically. I played a song the other day for my wife and she said she had no idea I liked that kind of music. Well, I never specifically 'liked' it on my streaming service so it never got played(in over 5 years).

One thing I can say is that YouTube(pre-YT music) was instrumental in helping me discover a lot of new music. The suggestion algorithm they were using worked really well. Unfortunately I can't say the same for Spotify, which seems to trap you in a cave of your previous likes.

If I can find the time, I'm going to switch back to my MP3 collection. It will take some work, but I need to undo the damage done by streaming.

I could buy an album on MP3 for $10+ now, oooor I could go to the local Good Will regularly and pick up any CDs that look interesting for $1 apiece and rip those, then return them to Good Will when I don't want to hang on to them anymore.

This doesn't really work if you want new releases or something specific of course, but I've rediscovered some great music from late 80s to early 2000s artists by browsing it periodically. And for $1 a CD, it's much easier to justify taking a risk on something.

Heh, yeah, that's actually what used to motivate me to buy things on CD.

Nowadays, I'm very fortunate to have a decent bit more disposable income than I used to, so I'm happy to put some directly towards the artist. I prefer to buy from Bandcamp where I can, which seems to have the largest artist share (up to 100% on promo days!)

I still buy digital albums as well, and I've bought a decent number of albums on Bandcamp over the years. But I also enjoy getting older albums cheap when I can.

There's also something to be said for physically coming across old analog media and being reminded of its existence, sparked to revisit the memories kept in old home recordings or ancient photographs; I don't think there's any equivalent for digital data stored on some social media site. Digital data is perfect for our throwaway consumerist culture and I lament that this also applies to memories of our own lives.

tbf, this something also works with digital data as long as it’s stored on some physical media you own. I have a hard disk on which I throw random stuff since mostly a decade. There is nothing really important on there. It’s mostly unorganized junk that is probably 99% available on the internet. No files I would ever really need.

But I like to sometimes browse it because a lot of those files are connected to memories. There are some music files on it, some pirated movies that a university friend copied on it. And those dirty xvid and wma files feels like they are really mine.

I cannot suffer the binge era. It's mind boggling. The constant discussions about watching 100 things without never moving [0].. sometimes at 1.25x speed. It's just insane.

[0] I consider moving out of your house a massive indicator of value.

> In that Age of Browsing, you had fewer choices and you had to navigate them carefully.

Even in today's buffet world, you still CAN navigate them carefully. And it's a good mental habit to have.

I consciously watch myself and try to notice when I've failed to do this. For example, suppose I'm looking for an answer to some question on Google, and I enter my query. I can then either:

(1) look at the first 10 and judiciously choose which are worth my time to read/skim and ctrl-click to open a tab for (say) 3 of them, or

(2) aimlessly ctrl-click all and get 10 tabs to look at.

#2 feels good in a way because I'm getting more info. But #1 gives superior results. Not just because I have less to wade through, but also because somehow my mind is in a more focused, active state. #2 is a sign that my mind has checked out and is not really engaged in this part of whatever I'm doing.

This happens more in the digital/streaming world because the buffets are larger. But it's not exclusive to that. I can still fall into the trap with physical stuff. I can still go into a store and try on 10 shirts without thinking carefully about whether I like them, and since I entered the changing room in the wrong frame of mind to choose a good shirt to buy, I'm probably still in the wrong frame of mind after trying on 10 shirts.

It's gotten to the point where I always feel like I'm "behind" on good movies or TV because it's become so accessible and everyone around me seems to have managed to watch it all. I can't stand it though and often find myself repeating shows out of convenience and comfort.

When I do find new shows I like, they end up feeling more special as well.

Going on a tangent, one advantage of the analog TV was that often one could watch a channel even in the presence of interference or a weak signal, whereas with the digital this is no longer possible.

Analog TV could change channels as fast as you could turn the selector. Changing the channel on my TV now often takes more than 5 seconds. This seems like something that could be improved.

Channel surfing is dead.

I use an antenna + HDHomeRun device on my network, then the Channels app on an Apple TV. This works much better and faster than relying on the TV's native tuner, remote, and channel-switching capabilities.

https://www.silicondust.com

https://getchannels.com

This is actually a misnomer for the most part. While it is true that analog TV degrades gracefully to static and digital cuts out, Digital actually requires a lot less signal to noise to display. When digital cuts out it's actually at much lower signal levels then when analog tv is basically static. I will concede that the analog audio inside the signal is more robust, humans are very good at picking out sound from static.

There are codecs which support this. I don't know if it's used anywhere because it certainly only makes sense for terrestrial broadcasting.

Yet, AM/FM radio is much better on remote, isolated places than DAB.

I woudn't trust DAB on a emergency.

At the cost of a much higher bandwidth. I don't disagree, just wan't to clarify it's not a issue of digital encoding.

The lower bandwidth of DAB results in lower quality. My car radio stays on FM because DAB is horrible.

> The lower bandwidth of DAB results in lower quality.

That's unlikely to be the reason. A 64 kbps AAC stream definitely has more potential than FM. If the DAB station sounds worse than FM station, it's probably because they use the same sound processing for both which is still optimized for FM.

I love starting my car with the hand crank that extends from beneath the front bumper.

I’m sure this comment is facetious, but as many motorcyclists will attest, something absolutely was lost in the 80s with the transition to electric starter motors.

Kickstarting a motorcycle is a truly pleasurable experience (at least for smaller displacements). And the loss is not just aesthetic, but practical too; you needn’t worry about your battery going flat — on some bikes you don’t even need the battery installed at all to start it!

Man this hits hard, over the last several years I’ve been experiencing a growing ennui about not having “a people” or “a place”, no anchors that define me and I can lean on for support. I have a loving family, a handful of close friends, and a nice house in a nice neighborhood but that’s not the same; I would uproot my family and move (and have considered it), I have no roots here. This article evokes similar feelings, wishing I had a bookshelf instead of 100’s of kindle books, CDs/records, and video discs on shelves instead of Spotify and Netflix so my son could see what I prefer more easily, so I could group, remember, and recommend.

Sigh

I could resonate with OP watching Netflix solely because he paid for it. I pay for Netflix, Disney+ and Prime. The only way for me to NOT get the most of them and waste my time (watching the generic netflix shows) is to browse a few minutes of IMDB beforehand, keep a note of all the movies which fits my interests and search them up on netflix/dinsey+/prime. I know this is still a waste of time, but atleast this was I get the satisfaction of watching what I selected and not what was selected for me.

PS: Even though I subscribe to three different streaming platform, 1/3 of the time I don't find it and have to go the pirate way.

I don’t know. Sure, the current state of affairs isn’t perfect. But being able to search for any music anywhere in the world (not limited to the physical media you have on you), having it beamed in pristine digital quality (no worn out cassette) to a pair of wireless earbuds (no half bent wires resulting in only the left earbud working) that also block outside noise (so you can actually hear the music) sure is pleasurable to me.

Now the question is: Does pleasurable equal good? I've heard that Heroin is really pleasurable while you are still high on it. ^_^

Also, my personal experience with Deezer was that their app is so horribly buggy that copying MP3s to an old player and physically connecting the cinch cable turned out to be much more reliable.

It might depend on the person.

When I was 14 with a Minidisc I had around 15 discs I’d regularly listen to. Couldn’t afford any more.

Later I expanded to a ~300 CD collection which I also put on my iPod.

Now I have access to a gazillion songs, but my Apple Music “library” is still less than 500 albums.

I spend 95% of my listening time with those 500 albums. I have never asked for or sought any “suggestion” from the Apple Music app.

However in case there’s something new I want to listen to (I read a review, I heard a song on TV I’m interested in) I have it right there, legally in perfect quality. Don’t need to buy a CD and rip it to iTunes and send it to my iPod or worse, record it in real-time to a Minidisc.

So I’m still not convinced I’m currently “missing out” on anything from the 90’s/00’s.

I tried the whole streaming thing, it ended up not being for me.

I still buy physical media, often on formats that are long dead because partially, it's fun to tool around with dead formats, and no silly copyright dispute is going to suddenly pull my ability to watch the original Star Wars cut on laserdisc.

Digital files are as ephemeral as the storage they reside on. Piling more ephemeral storage into the equation does little to help.

I play Christmas records at Christmas for the aesthetics.

The most annoying thing actually (other than that records scratch easily and literally degrade a bit every time you play them) is that each side of a 33 1/3 RPM record only has a few songs... but perhaps that's part of the charm

I have bid fond farewell to (audio and video) cassettes, records, CDs, etc. Just threw out the last few of my actual spinning rust hard drives, too. I love it.

I got back into analog media for a little while but stopped because the prices are just so ridiculous. A single Burzum tape costs more than £30.

Realize that in current dollars that's probably about what vinyl LPs cost when they were the primary way that people bought music.

Tape is fetishized like crazy right now so that’s not surprising. I see runs of 500 tapes on Bandcamp sold out immediately all the time for not-so-well-known artists.

I think the vinyl shortage is contributing a lot to this. Right now if you want a physical copy that's not a CD or by a major act (Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran both released vinyl albums that supposedly took up the majority of the worlds music vinyl production), you're stuck with tapes. And very few people seem to want CDs.

I remember only a couple years ago that tapes were the dirt cheap option of getting something physical. At least by me it still is if you're buying in person; most of the punk bands and electronic artists are just recording over old tapes they've found so you can buy em for five to ten bucks a pop at the show.

That is interesting as vinyl can have an audiophile component to it depending on the release but tape is exactly the opposite and often purposefully so. Then there is the ease of skipping around with vinyl. I get the appeal either way, just find it interesting people are being forced to do with tape when it’s not their first choice.

Well, I certainly hope you're not giving money to that fascist troll in 2022.

> There’s great pleasure in repetition and ritual. My family came to know a lot of dialogue by heart.

That bit resonates a lot with me. We had a rotation of regular movies that we would watch with my family and it was a pleasure every time. I remember the cheer comfort that came out of this, when someone proposed to watch a classic. We keep quoting some of these to this day.

I love half price books stores..I have a kindle stash but that feeling of browsing in a bookstore cannot compare. You can’t read comics and graphic novels digitally. They also carry records and first editions. I don’t care much about first editions but I want to support them in small ways. I gift books to my friends children for Xmas and New Years.

i feel the same way about spotify. it's great having access to everything, but it ultimately kinda destroyed my music hobby.

the version of me from 10 or 20 years ago would be ashamed of what i listen to now... but that could also just be the natural effects of aging.

I’m younger than you and as a teen with no money, I used to listen free music on Jamendo. There were a lot of crap on it but also a good number of very authentic, very nice albums. They were hard to found but it was so good once you discovered some new thing like. It was like the music was made for me. Waiting for me to discover it and listening it in loop.

Spotify is full of music I like. But it’s probably because it’s full of music that was intentionally made to be liked by most humans.

It’s like industrial food. Sure I like it and I could probably eat that everyday (health issues aside). But it’s boring.

All these feels like being a spoiled kid.

I sometimes wonder if I wouldn’t be more happy just going back to piracy. « Owning » those movies, that music library on this hard drive.

I don’t really miss the physical mediums (ok, a little) but what I miss is owning the stuff. Even if it’s files.

I am absurdly irritated when things just disappear on Netflix or when Season $x it’s not available there whereas I’m paying every month to access those things. It really feels like the industry disrespects me.

At this point, I think the only reason why I’m still paying is that I’m sharing my account with other people.

No encoding issues or micro-stutter in analog. Gotta love that.

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