The Present Indicative, 21 October 2025
My Current Mood: Time Is a Flat Circle
“Oh-a, oh! I met your children. Oh-a, oh! What did you tell them?” Buggles
“How does that work?” my son asked four months ago while I was placing the needle on a record spinning on the turntable. It could have been a conversation from four decades ago, but here we are in 2025: an adult playing vinyl in a room with also a smart speaker that can play anything.
I gave him the basics: a small crystal vibrates within the rotating grooves impressed on an album, and the record player amplifies the vibrations to recreate sounds originally pressed into those grooves.
He was astonished. A teenager actually impressed with something. “That sounds like magic! I mean…I get that computers can make music, but grooves? A crystal? That’s crazy.”
It certainly is crazy. I didn’t even get into wax cylinders, the brass horn that used to serve as a speaker, or Nipper, the little dog listening intently to an Edison-Bell phonograph. I just mentioned that the technology was around long before computers.
They took the credit for your second symphony
In graduate school I made the case that the music market was cyclical. It was the mid 2000s and we were talking about the digital revolution in a class on the history of the book. Napster was long since over but the “democratic” access to digital music as often illegal downloads continued to spell the end of the recording industry as we knew it. The case was made that digital killed the video star.
“Au contraire!” I said before I learned French. The dawn of rock and roll was known for 45s, a 7-inch record that held a pop single and a B-side. Introduced in 1949, they were preferred by bobby-soxers and Beatlemaniacs until longer playing (LP) albums took over the longer-haired culture in the later ’60s and ’70s. Whole albums owned the music market as records evolved into cassettes and then compact discs to close the 20th century.
If our preferences (and deficits of attention) were in part determined by technological opportunity then how do we account for the popularity of the 45, when the full length LP already existed at 33 RPMs?
Rewritten by machine on new technology
Our whole lives were already changing when the web went worldwide in the mid-nineties. Tech terminology began to creep into common parlance. Add a historical event like 9/11 in the mix and we’ve got a spectrum of generations that fall on one side of the digital chasm or the other. Immigrants and natives. We’re all fully connected to our phones, but some of us are fluent and others need a dictionary (or a child to show them what to do).
You would think the preferences within demographics would be clear. Anyone unfamiliar with a library card catalogue or rotary phone should only experience things by touch screens. But that’s not the case. My son isn’t the only one who thinks record players are magic. Younger generations have embraced licorice pizza like it’s licorice and pizza! The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) reported that of the $2 billion in US revenue that made up physical purchases of music in 2024, $1.4 billion of it was from vinyl. Yes, 84% of all revenue that year went to streaming, but vinyl sales in the US broke a 40-year high. And Gen Z is leading that charge. Speaking from personal experience the buying experience is also not exclusively digital. My hometown has two record stores, and the town next door has three! Brick and mortar on Main Street USA!
And now I understand the problems you could see
Now I won’t make the case this renaissance is permanent. For every Reformation, there’s a Counter-Reformation. Gen Beta will probably have quantum chips that make everything virtually first person. But that’s a culture for future interpretation. Fow now, let’s enjoy the warmth of vinyl recordings and realize that just because things can be cutting edge, it doesn’t mean they should be. Now if you’ll excuse me I need to develop this roll of 35mm film.
In Related News…
The Future Indicative is here! My podcast on the trends, technologies, personalities, and narratives of business! Episode One is rightly on Origin, and I talk to Matthew Josefowicz, entrepreneur and founder of the insurance research and advisory firm, Novarica. I divide each episode into two digestible parts (around 12 minutes each) for your auditory pleasure, and we cover a four-category framework that I define as the Four S in the word business.
Wait, did you say auditory? This is for listening? Yep. For your ears only. I respect a lot of people who deliver video and audio for the consumer’s multi-channel preferences. But if I’m delivering this experience to a B2B audience, I expect they’ll be multitasking. Get some work done. Absorb it while crunching numbers or getting ready to present a deck to the team. You won’t be distracted.
And while I hope it’s enjoyable to all ages and stages of professional trajectory, I must admit I’m targeting the future. Those record-playing Zoomers may prefer video to audio podcast formats (41% of Gen Z consume audio-first experiences compared to 46% in the broader 15–64 demographic), I am hopeful they…we collectively…can work through our ADD together. To quote Buggles (again):
“Oh-a, oh! You were the first one. Oh-a, oh! You were the last one.”
The Future Indicative, Ep 1 Part 1
The Future Indicative, Ep 1 Part 2
Enjoy!
Alex Effgen