The Evolution of Nostalgic Media Consumption

By Victoria Troxler

VHS technology may seem as ancient as the dinosaurs by this point, so it’s hard to believe that was only 15 years ago. At the same time, music had also made the big jump from tape to CD. Think back to the days when you had to carry your chunky fur-covered CD case everywhere and you could only listen to 12 songs at the time. It was a lot harder to hide guilty pleasures like show tunes in the depths of your CD case, like you now can do with the iPod. Since this prehistoric time, movie-watching and music outlets have physically shrunk; getting music for free is now a breeze!

The shrinking started in the early 90s with the Hit Clips trend. If you don’t remember this rudimentary music player, it was a tiny boom box that allowed you to play a single song at a time. Even though it was marketed as a toy, the product foreshadowed what was about to happen to its colossal Walkman counterpart. The perpetual trend of the shrinking music player had begun.

It was the rising popularity of mp3’s in 2008 that led to a massive drop in sales for CD’s. It also paved the way for programs like Napster and iTunes to change the way we consume music forever. It was in 2001 that the first iPod turned the CD case into an antique. Just 10 years ago, the iPod was about the size of a deck of cards with a battery life of only 10 hours, and now the largest iPod Touch is .28 inches thick and can last up to 40 hours.

As for movies, the ancient VHS tape has become a fossil. In 1996, the much sleeker DVD player turned watching movies into a clear, crisp experience. These new types of media paved the way for the introduction of Netflix in 1997 which was also accompanied by a trend of illegally downloading media. It seemed just few short weeks later that Blue Ray disks were introduced.

When given the choice to buy physical copies of music and movies or to illegally download them, the latter is obviously the most popular. According to Recording Industry Association of America, “From 2004 through 2009 alone, approximately 30 billion songs were illegally downloaded on file-sharing networks.” The introduction of Napster in 2000, followed quickly by government crackdowns on music downloading, made society question the prevalence of this new trend. However, illegal media was only beginning. Computers and now iPads make this process even easier. Why buy a movie when you can illegally download it for free and plug your computer into a TV?

What, then, does the future hold?

I foresee bite-sized media will continue to shrink and illegal downloads will get even easier. Before we know it, the iPad will be paper-thin and CD's will be the next vinyl records. With this trend I see the music and movie industries drastically upping the regulations and penalties for illegal use of their products. And because those regulations likely won’t work, the way musicians make money will drastically change as well.