I'm not much for nostalgia, but one of the things that sucks about getting old (at least for me) is an end to a common musical culture. I think I have, like, one friend that's waiting to hear what TV On The Radio is going to next. But for the most part it's an individual experience. We're all our own DJ now. For better or worse.Well, it's not just music. It's television and movies and books too. And it's mostly happening due to social trends that have been in the making for the last seventy-five years at least. At one point, music was almost entirely a communal experience. But decades of advances in making music more portable has made music far more individual than it used to be. Additionally, as with television, there are simply far more choices now than there used to be. As it turns out, lots of choices plus individual tastes is a recipe for nonpolar and idiosyncratic tastes in culture consumption. Perhaps it's obvious in retrospect.
I think it's got to be a good thing, though, that one can now easily find communities devoted to the same things you are in a way that wasn't really possible ten or twenty years ago. The internet truly is marvelous.
