The Agony and Ecstasy of Music and Movies Before Streaming

It’s not even 8 a.m., and I’m already playing DJ to my toddlers at breakfast. This week, my three-year-old requests to hear David Bowie — but only “Let’s Dance,” over and over, because that’s his new favorite song. Last week, we listened to The Beatles’ greatest hits for six days straight, and occasionally, he’ll ask for a specific children’s song by Raffi or The Wiggles.

Whether we’re at home or in the car, music is always seemingly on demand. My kids can ask for a song, and my husband or I will quickly bring it up on our family Spotify account. Like many parents, my Spotify Wrapped in recent years has been a mess.

We approach TV with a similar attitude. Our kids get a little bit of screentime as we’re prepping dinner most nights, and between our Netflix, YouTube and Amazon Prime accounts, they’re able to watch whatever their toddler hearts desire, which is sometimes Bluey and Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood and too often, Blippi.

My kids only know a world where demand is always met with supply, especially when it comes to media, and I sometimes wonder if that’s a bad thing. At the very least, it’s completely opposite to how we grew up.

When we were kids in the ‘90s, media consumption was a careful combination of persistence and strategic planning. If you wanted to hear a new hit song, you had to wait for it to come on the radio. Listening for the Spice Girls and Britney Spears on Rick Dees’ Weekly Top 40 was a Saturday morning tradition (as was getting mad at the radio when your song wasn’t number one). If you wanted to make a mixtape and you didn’t already own a copy of the song? You and your blank tape better have been ready to hit that “record” button on the stereo when it finally came on the radio.

Even later when we had the tech to burn mixed CDs, it still required the arduous process of finding the song — and not a virus-filled MP3 file — then watching it slowly download on Napster. God forbid if your family had dial-up and your download stalled because someone called the home phone. The internet required a lot of patience when we were teens.

The ‘90s also provided the thrill of the unknown every time you turned on the TV. Forget scrolling through hundreds of movies and TV shows on a streaming platform. All we had was the TV Guide and you were limited to shows that happened to be on when you turned on the TV. That meant semi-memorizing the schedule so I knew exactly when Saved By The Bell and Sabrina The Teenage Witch aired, and setting up the VCR to record Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman if my family decided to go out for dinner on Saturday night.

My kids will never experience the heartbreak of “missing” a show, unless it’s a live sports game or awards show. They won’t have to set up devices to record TV episodes or songs. They won’t need to wait patiently for media because it’s all at their fingertips.

My concern is that the same attitude (and impatience) often applies to learning and memorizing things. Don’t know or remember something? Google it. The answer to almost any question is readily accessible 24/7. Long gone are the pre-internet days when we would have to look up the meaning of a word in a physical dictionary, or find out a fact in an encyclopedia. “Look it up” had a very different meaning when we were kids.

I don’t mean to sound like a complete luddite, because I’m guilty of using and enjoying everything the world wide web has to offer, too. But our home is still filled with physical books, vinyl records, CDs, and probably even the odd DVD. I sometimes wonder if my kids will have these things in their grownup homes — and not in an ironic sort of way.

As Millennials, we’re caught somewhere in the middle of subscribing to multiple streaming services and remembering the thrill of hearing a song you’ve been waiting to listen to all day finally came on the radio. The former has made life so much more convenient, especially with kids, and the latter taught us that all good things are worth waiting for.