I have seen the argument, particularly about movies but it applies to music as well, that there used to be a thrill and some clout, as the kids say, about tracking down a difficult to find, VHS-only copy of some cult film from India that you finally found in a Japanese porno tape catalog you had to have a friend translate, and you ended up paying like $350 for the tape for some reason and it arrived eight months later in a box so beat to shit you had like a 30% chance of being able to play the tape, and if you did you'd see that it was like a tape of a tape of a tape of a live broadcast and you couldn't see or understand shit anyway
But you had it, you found it, and no one else did
And now you just torrent it as easily as you would the new Star Wars, because everything is available everywhere
I can see that being a bummer, of course, those were fun times, but it would be pretty bizarre, and against the spirit of the internet, if we didn't put an end to that and make sharing things infinitely easier, so it's pretty pointless to say this new era shouldn't have happened
Like, you know what I miss sometimes? Figuring out exactly how long a blank tape was, because it was never quite the number they gave on the package, and then picking songs for my mixtape that would best fill that time, figuring out how many seconds of blank space to put between them, etc., etc. so there weren't like three minutes of dead air at the end of each side. Probably most kids didn't bother doing this, but I thought it made things more fun
Do I think we should go back to that, though? Are you fucking kidding me? I recently sent my friend a Spotify playlist of shit from around the world that I never would have heard of a couple decades back, because they wouldn't have sold it in Newbury Comics or put it on the local college radio station. And it was easy as hell and I could send him twenty more mixes like that in the time it would have taken me to do one tape. Plus he's overseas and do you know what postal rates are like these days, sunny Jim? Miss me with that
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