Just to rant a little: I feel like the modern Internet has cheapened and reduced to mediocrity the experience of almost anything worth doing, from shopping to news to school. Almost nothing is fun, especially with having to remember what feels like a billion cryptic passwords.
The internet has been a double-edged sword, for certain. Personally, I hate how easy spreading misinformation and scamming people have become, and the internet has definitely made newspapers an endangered species, which is sad and scary. Keep in mind, if people, in general, enjoyed brick and mortar shopping, the internet wouldn't be a threat to it. The reason some of those experiences have been reduced is because the population, as a whole, doesn't enjoy them very much, though the reasons for that might vary. That also doesn't mean people enjoy using the internet either; it just means it's easier and takes less time to do something they already thought was a chore. I don't care a lot for Uber or Lyft, but riding a taxi was always an unpleasant experience. Uber and Lyft are at least easy. I can remember getting out of the Blue Note after a show in college and being unable to get a cab. Luckily, at the time, I just lived a couple miles from downtown, but I had to stumble drunk through downtown and campus and cross a busy street right before the speed limit went up to 55 in the wee hours of the morning. Then, the next morning, I either had to get a friend to take me back downtown to get my car, had to find a reason to go back downtown on foot, or had to call a cab, which would pick me up whenever it felt like it. I overindulge a lot less now that I'm near 50 than I did in my mid-20's, but, when I need a ride for whatever reason, I can pull up the two apps, compare prices, choose which I want, and I'll know in real time where my driver is. It's not perfect, but it's a lot better than having to get a cab, not knowing how much your ride is going to cost, and the drivers are usually more pleasant than the cabbies.
That the Internet is obliterating OTA radio is no surprise to me, as it strives to appropriate everything and reduce it to an infinite series of lousy apps that never get better.
As we've previously discussed, a one-to-many medium is always going to have its struggles against what's theoretically a one-to-one medium. Personally, I've always found the playlists on Pandora, Spotify, and Apple Music to be boring and repetitive. I might not feel that way if I were my niece's age as she's mostly listening to top-40, which is already mostly repetitive, but the streaming services' playlists have always sounded lousy to me. Maybe AI curated playlists are better, but I don't use those services enough to know and, the rare recent times I have, I haven't noticed a difference. I also realize radio has a problem with stale and impersonal playlists. With some PD's overseeing multiple stations, they can't go over the playlist with a fine-toothed comb and make sure they sound perfect. Then again, the F10 and print PD who didn't really want the job or only wanted it for the title and the opportunity has existed since the end of the card system, which had its own set of problems.
The one thing that I'll concede the new Internet (Web 3.0?) is that the discovery and research of new music and other media is genuinely easier, but again, less fun because it's almost too easy, because part of the fun – at least for me – is in the challenge of searching through record stores to find what I'm looking for, and discovering other interesting things along the way. Fortunately record stores are having a moment, and their popularity is surging, so they're not likely to disappear any time soon. I like to think that it is perhaps in part because people are feeling like I am: it's more fun!
The neighborhood record store didn't get killed by the internet; the big box retailers put most of them out of business by the early 90's. My neighborhood never had such a store to speak of, probably because there were a Target, a Sears, and a Service Merchandise less than a mile away. A Venture opened practically across the street from the Service Merchandise, and a couple blocks closer to my house, around 1990. A small record store never had a chance. Maybe the nostalgia of the record store is a bigger draw than I credit it, but I'm a little more cynical. Borders and Barnes and Noble put the small neighborhood bookstores out of business by the early part of the century. They're coming back, too, but I tend to think it's less because of any love for the small bookstore than that the big bookstores are getting squeezed. Borders went out of business more than ten years ago, and it also owned either Waldenbooks or B. Dalton, which it shut down several years before its own reckoning. The other was owned by Barnes and Noble, which shut it down around the same time. Those smaller bookstores offered a niche that people have realized can be profitable again. If you're going to operate a neighborhood bookstore, you need, however, to be web savvy. That's going to be almost 40% of your business at a minimum. I tend to think record stores are coming back because, while there's always been a market for it, it's small enough now that the big guys don't put much effort into it. Around 1999, Alan Jackson had a hit called "Little Man" about big chains coming in and shutting down local merchants. The song identified the problem well but concluded people didn't know they were "killing the little man." That part was wrong. People knew exactly what they were doing. They wanted the lower prices, convenience, and immediacy of the bigger retailers. Plus, the jobs those companies offered were generally better than the ones the local stores offered.
