FoxTrot Classics by Bill Amend for March 04, 2022

This comic is 20 years old, and we’ve largely moved on from CDs as a medium for selling music. But I can drive down to Walmart and buy music on a vinyl album again. Ain’t the future grand?

It’s like someone expecting you to do website development for free.

Yep some people have no business smarts. Then there’s Peter just no smarts at all.

Yes, Peter, you’re quite right. And you’re one of them.

I remember those days: “Alas! what will became of us without Napster!?”.

This ain’t Colombia house kid.

I remember Napster and Kazaa well.

It may be a 20 year old strip, but Mr. Amend was predicting the invention of e-Ink. Note the Metallica ad that morphs into a Dr. Dre ad.

I remember being so concerned about how the courts and music business would treat digital music players, I got two RIOs in case they got outlawed. Remember the RIO? It took a AA battery and the slot for that was thicker than the rest of the device.

To modernize this one, Peter could say he’s an ‘influencer’ and he’d give the shop a good review – if they give him the freebies.

I had to look up “Napster” on Wikipedia.

MP3s don’t sound as good as CDs, but that’s the price we pay for quantity over quality

Nice try though….

“It’s a way to listen to music with far less compression than most streaming versions and no annoying scratches or track wear like vinyl. Obviously it was deemed obsolete.”

I once had a record of waves that was designed to be listened to at all of those speeds. 16 rpm sounded like a distant ocean while 78 sounded like waves a boat would be moving through. I also remember if you listened to voices that had been sped up to sound like, say, Alvin and the Chipmunks, you could hear what the actual voices sounded like by playing the record at 16 .

There are some cassette tapes (along with some movies on VHS) sitting on a shelf in my Dad’s house from when my siblings and I were kids

Actually with the courts threatening to reduce the supply I would think it a better capitalistic move to increase the price as the demand would increase.

At an average cost of over $17 each, with only the top selling artists seeing much more than about 1% of record store sales, can you blame people wanting to get music much cheaper somewhere else? Nowadays you can buy directly from your favorite artists, but it took a long time for the music industry to come around to the fact that everybody hated their price gouging scheme.

Oh, they still find ways to screw over the artists, but now they do it over the internet instead of hard physical media.

For those unfamiliar with the term Napster, in the early days of the internet, it was a website where people would upload mp3 music and others could download it FREE. It ran for several years and allowed people to accumulate huge volumes of music but then the music industry compelled Uncle Sugar to shut it down. Ironically, we can do the same thing now on youtube and no one seems to mind.

Get them at your library and burn to your iTunes.

Another strip that you’ll need to explain to anyone born in the last 20 years.

I remember Napster, and I knew it wouldn’t last but….