While rambling about subscription vs advertising, I observed that Substack opened a door that was already available. Subscription-based media is far older than ad-based, and subscriptions were always possible on the web. A few might have tried it, but the attempts were so weak that nobody noticed until Substack showed it could be profitable for both the creators and the publisher.
The new bottom-up media is replacing the old top-down for a very simple reason. More choices are available. For me the best part of the newer mode is NOT the new material.
I stopped watching Hollywood-made drama and comedy around 1990, even as I was watching lots of “news” crap and “reality” shows on TV. The Hollywood productions were uniformly preachy and partisan, and when they weren’t partisan they were just dumb. I tried some of the popular “comedies” in the Seinfeld style. None of the characters acted like people. They were talking English but their actions and concerns were NYC alien. I stopped reading new books around the same time for the same reason.
The good part of the new choice is the OLD material. Archive.org and Otrcat.com make OLD radio easily available. Google Books makes OLD books and magazines easily available.
Now the same question. Was this level of variety physically possible before the web? ABSOLUTELY YES, at least on the audio side. Some TV services offered a choice of old and new movies, choosable by dialing a number on your phone. This Zenith system used multiplexing of the TV signal, so it could only handle a few different movies at once.
Wide variety in video had to wait for broadband cable, initially used for subscription TV and then for the web.
Earlier, some “wired radio” stations offered a wide choice of records on demand, again by calling on your phone. Some were coin-op like jukeboxes, others were simply available through the phone line to anyone who bought a subscription. Since each phone line was separate, the variety was only limited by the number of turntables in the central exchange. As seen in the bottom picture, the exchanges had LOTS of turntables!
The jukebox systems were common enough to show up in some movies:
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The 1942 private-eye movie “X Marks the Spot” centers on an interesting and forgotten coin-op technology, something like a friendly juke box. This 1950 episode of the radio show ‘This is Your FBI’ also features the same system, with an interesting prediction of its future progress.
The “Number Please” system had a central office equipped with a record library and turntables … presumably a separate turntable for each remote jukebox … and pleasant-voiced girls as the DJs. It must have been familiar to moviegoers, but I’d guess it was only installed in a few big cities.
Private subscription music is much older, dating almost to the first organized telephone service. In fact some prognosticators thought the telephone would be more useful for broadcasting than for conversation; the telegraph and postal system seemed perfectly adequate for sending information. Starting around 1890, many city phone exchanges offered a “music channel” charged to your regular phone bill. These disappeared before WW2 in America but continued into the ’70s in parts of Europe.
Later: Here’s a picture of a real ‘juke system’, also from 1942. The movie wasn’t too far from the reality.
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