We Used To Wait

“It’s hard to remember now, but at one time, MTV really was watched just like commercial radio was listened to: you would turn it on and see what came around, and if you particularly liked a video, you’d wait a while and hope you heard it. That’s what half the slumber parties of my adolescence were about: waiting for Michael Jackson or Duran Duran.

We don’t wait very much anymore. It’s not just that this model of MTV largely went away, or that getting most of your music listening through the radio faded. It’s that the entire idea of ephemeral availability — that you would have to sit and wait for something to be played for you, and that at other times you had to do without it — is simply not how people expect to digest much of anything anymore. The VJs who believed they were at the beginning of the age of the music video were actually at the end of the age in which innovation in music would involve giving people new ways to wait for you to play the music they wanted to hear.”
 — I can’t help thinking that the world will be a better place when the last one of us who goes on about how we had to sit by the radio with a cassette recorder and wait for a song we liked to come on so we could tape it and how there was always the slight sound of your little sister’s phone conversation in the background and gosh how simple that time seems now dies. But I also know that the future is mostly about fires, so it won’t make much of a difference. Anyway, read this.