A related anecdote: For teens a half-generation before mine, for music, it was common to buy CDs (and to have the money to do so). For my generation, it was co

A related anecdote: For teens a half-generation before mine, for music, it was common to buy CDs (and to have the money to do so). For my generation, it was common to pirate everything (so it was okay that we were all broke). In both cases, there was a sense of "ownership" over one's music collection. If someone wanted to take it away from us, they'd have to break into our house or burn it down or wipe our hard drive or something. What do today's teens have? YouTube and Spotify and SoundCloud. Slightly more expensive than "free", even though affordability has gone down. But what's worse is how easily TPTB can reach into your playlist, your account, the platform as a whole, and erase your music. Just, poof, gone, with no warning. The older ways of building a music collection still exist, of course, but they're not as accessible. Best Buy doesn't even sell physical media anymore; every teen's favorite boom box (their used car) is now prohibitively expensive. Torrenting still exists, but it's outside the mainstream of music consumption; can you even do it on an iPhone? Downloading in general is discouraged by the big platforms, except as a way to keep you engaging with the app if the WiFi goes down. Teens, of course, have existed for millennia without easy access to the latest pop hits. I dunno if cultural expectations have caught up to this regression to the mean, though. Are you uncool if you don't have SOME kind of musical identity? Advertisers sure want you to think so. Your parents probably treat your adolescence as an echo of their own, too, even with the massive changes in just this small corner of teen life. Carbon copy to every other facet as is appropriate. So (in a bit of semantic irony), I buy it. (Also ironically, given the above,) it's a bit of a mirror of Millennial angst wrt home-buying, marriage, etc. It's actually obvious to me, and obvious why Boomers can't see it (or are slow to come to it): they hold all the capital that would otherwise be solving our issue.