The jukebox is back and the war for tradition is on.
However, this not the purveyor of pay to play music peaking in the middle of the 20th century, but a fusion between stark reality and dreams.
With competition in technology as fierce as a hypothetical feeding frenzied alligator pond full of savage reptile carnivores out for flesh and blood, the future hangs in the balance. In this ecosystem of fast moving ingenuity of intellectual property cannibalism, at times the truth is lost or at least marooned. It doesn’t help that the mainstream press largely ignores the truth or in this case, a brutal struggle for survival. If the biased organism of big tech is the hotshot juvenile gators, retro hardware are the elderly beasts who for decades have steadily dominated the consumer marketplace in a consistent mode of survival.
The process of innovation attempting to morph everything into digital and electronic compartmentalization transcends the generations and fits a succinct narrative.
The alligator pond scenario illustrates that consumers are reverting back to the stone ages of analog technology in the face of streaming content overload. This is a reasonable reaction to avoid the deluge of a vast oversaturation from the constant bombardment of content from non-traditional channels delivered to a captive audience. Darwinism is not concise but favors the unique or kitsch as the past is worshipped by a growing number of end users.
As no filters are in place to limit the carpet bombing of audio entertainment and the music industry colliding with the unrelenting supply and demand unnavigable to the average end-user over 50 years of age, the younger generations that blindly ignore the future controlling the past and all the lucrative of intellectual property are demanding a rebirth of the reliable over the decadently innovative. The latter half of this sentiment can be shared by all.
While society gently ages into the hellfire of inevitable chaos, time-tested hardware is reclaimed from the junkyard and the jukebox is making a comeback worthy of a dynamic duo returning to the front stage of the dive bar scene as the rigors of age are gracefully hidden behind the darkness and audio infused ambience of the room. If it clicks and turns, listen. The jukebox at least for the time being once again rules the room.
The process of selecting a song is as simple as popping two quarters into the coin slot. In today’s language just replace quarters with credits and coin slot with a digital handshake linked to a credit card and let the fun begin.
Within this realm, Baby Boomers are given a voice that can compete with their grandchildren by becoming temporary rockstar DJ’s at the expense of those not even old enough to remember, as egos are stoked and validated in deploying smartphones to collate playlists from the 60’s and 70’s, temporarily stunning the remaining youth at the establishment as guitar riffs reverberate. The bar staff and patrons alike share moments and glances transcending the cultural language barrier between the young and the ancient, the shared experience creating a hot marketplace for technology geared towards interaction through hardware-based platforms. The retro value is as compelling as adoption of Perestroika and Glasnost during the seething frozen landscape of the Cold-war. Serving the opposite of the gone-viral nature of the modern musician bombarding the frontal cortex of the brain, legends are being reborn though shared experiences and knowledge that is now recycled through an impassioned journey through the fleeting decades, the tech community has gained another channel of substantial revenue at the expense of the shrinking societal attention span.
Imagine a weekday evening at a bar or a club where the music emanates from a single location and personal devices are relinquished only to play a song heard by all probably not appreciated and not distinguished by society as experiences are a recourse for two decades of social negligence at the expense and quality of life. Where is family within this dynamic and paradigm of going forward and averting the malfeasance of going backwards amid the mental gymnastics of life?
In the present tense this is real life. The assertions raw, compelling and indicative to a point in time that may or or may not exist. Self-expression has its limits within the capacity of humanity, the keyboard at the whim of one’s typing skills not required with only thoughts and dreams defying an understanding of the universe through pixels and tunes.
While big tech is attempting to eliminate hardware for the sake of software, small victories for humanity ironically exist withing platforms that emulate the past to the best of their abilities.