laid-out-magazine-issue-1

Digital Music or YouTube?
Neither.
Record Stores
Written by
Christian Hernandez
In a culture of instant gratification and all
the mediums of entertainment that enable
instant gratification (Netflix, Youtube,
Apple music, the list goes on and fucking
on) sometimes we forget that at one point
humanity blissfully lived without these
frivolous luxuries and the thought never
occurred “Hey wouldn’t it be great to have
every song ever made at my fingertips?
Wouldn’t that be awesome!” Not quite.
There are holes and drawbacks to living in
a musical utopia where anything we can
possibly listen to is just a Youtube click
away. Sadly, the average teenager has no
idea what it’s like to live in a time where
your every desire isn’t satisfied, that there
was a time when, Gasp!, your options for
what to listen to were not infinite as the
desires imposed upon us by our capitalist
consumerist society.
There used to be a time when what
you wanted to listen to was limited to what
your record store carried. It didn’t matter
how awesome you thought Jesus and The
Mary Chain were. If your local record store
didn’t have it you continued to browse until
you found something else worth listening
to. And that’s precisely what we did, and it
was that limited option that caused us to
make choices that were exciting and exhilarating
because having a small option to
choose from, what your record store had,
was far from oppressive but was actually
fun and exciting. A wise person once said
(Lisa Simpson), “Getting everything you
want all the time will ultimately leave you
empty and unfulfilled” and the same is true
when you have every song at your fingertips.
Fun at first but ultimately unsatisfying.
But why? Why is it unsatisfying to have
everything?
Yeah, no. it must be great to search and
listen to any song that comes to your mind
at the drop of a hat. Mindless consumption
sounds amazing. We all try to turn nothing
into something. The mass produced jeans
that look the same in every store around
the nation becomes “something” unique
and tangible when wear and tear creates
faded colors, holes, and rips that makes one
of the most ordinary products in the world
something distinctly and uniquely yours.
But to try to turn digital music from nothing
to something is a futile cause. No matter
how much you replay a song, it will always
be one option among literally billions subject
to your own whims. The songs you like
become a temporary fulfillment to a desire
and will only get replaced shortly after,
like very shortly after, like 2 seconds after