BY DREW DRAIN There was a time when getting into music required patience, luck, and a little bit of stubbornness. In the 1990s, especia...
BY DREW DRAIN
There was a time when getting into music required patience, luck, and a little bit of stubbornness.In the 1990s, especially growing up in a small town, discovering something new felt like uncovering contraband. If you heard about a band from a magazine, a late-night radio show, or a friend of a friend, that was just the beginning. Actually getting the music was the challenge. There was no instant gratification. No search bar. No algorithm nudging you toward your next obsession.
There was just the record store.
For me, that meant Criminal Records. And Criminal Records, more often than not, did not have what I was looking for. You’d walk in with a list scribbled on a piece of paper, full of names you barely knew how to pronounce, and scan the racks anyway, hoping maybe, somehow, something had come in.
Usually it hadn’t.
But here’s the part that feels almost mythical now. They would take your list. They’d write it down, nod, and tell you they’d see what they could do. And then you’d wait. Weeks. And eventually, you’d get the call. Your music had arrived. A physical object, tracked down through distribution chains and industry relationships, now sitting behind the counter with your name on it.
That delay wasn’t just inconvenience. It was part of the experience. It built anticipation. It gave the music weight before you even heard a note.
And when you finally got it, you didn’t just play it. You studied it.
You opened the case and pulled out the booklet. Liner notes weren’t an afterthought. They were a map. They told you who played what, where it was recorded, who produced it. They hinted at entire networks of musicians and scenes you could follow like breadcrumbs. Lyric sheets turned songs into something you could hold onto, parse, memorize. Album art wasn’t just a thumbnail. It was part of the identity, something you stared at while the record spun, something that shaped how the music felt.
Listening was immersive in a way that was physical and deliberate.
Now compare that to today.
With streaming, the entire history of recorded music is essentially flattened into a single interface. Millions of songs, from every corner of the world, available instantly. You don’t wait. You don’t hunt. You don’t rely on whether your local store decided to stock something obscure. You just type, tap, and it’s there.
In a lot of ways, it’s incredible. The barriers that made discovery so difficult in a small town are gone. You’re no longer one of a handful of people trying to track down the “cool new” artist you read about somewhere. Now, you can explore scenes from Tokyo, Lagos, Reykjavík, or São Paulo without leaving your couch. The sheer scope of access is something 90s-era music fans couldn’t have imagined.
But something got lost in the trade.
Liner notes are mostly gone, reduced to metadata if they exist at all. Lyric sheets are optional, often detached from the listening experience. Album art is compressed into a square on a screen, glanced at rather than absorbed. Music itself has become more transient, more disposable. When everything is available, nothing requires effort. And when nothing requires effort, it can be harder for anything to feel essential.
In the 90s, you might listen to the same album over and over, not just because you loved it, but because it was one of the few new things you had. You built a relationship with it. Now, it’s easy to move on after a single listen, because there’s always something else waiting.
So the question becomes: is it worth it?
Is the loss of tangibility, of ritual, of deep engagement offset by the gain in access and variety?
There’s no clean answer. It depends on what you value.
Streaming has democratized music discovery in a way that’s undeniably powerful. It has connected listeners to artists they never would have found otherwise. It has erased the isolation of being a kid in a small town trying to chase down sounds from somewhere else.
But it has also stripped away some of the friction that made music feel like something you earned. And in doing so, it may have changed how deeply we connect with it.
Maybe the ideal version of music listening lives somewhere between the two eras. The access of today, combined with the intentionality of the past. The ability to hear anything, paired with the willingness to sit with something.
Because while it’s easier than ever to find music now, it might be harder than ever to truly experience it. Now, all you kids, take your streaming services and get off my lawn!
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- DREW DRAIN
Andrew (Drew) Drain is originally from Point Pleasant, WV, and he now resides in Chapel Hill, NC with his daughter. Drew works as a financial risk management professional to pay the bills, but his real passion is photography. He started taking photos of his daughter playing soccer as a way to resist the urge to coach her from the sidelines. Time behind the camera developed into a love for photography that he has paired with his love for sports and live music. Follow Drew’s Instagram, @Drew.Drain.Photo or his MaxPreps galleries, to check out more of his work or contact him if you need photos of your favorite athlete or performer.
Read Drew's posts here.
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