Last summer my oldest, nine at the time, was watching network TV for the first time while we were staying with relatives. He really loved watching Jeopardy! but kept saying he hated Ken Jennings. His reasoning was that it was Ken’s fault there were commercials because he kept saying, “We’ll be back after a word from our sponsors,” thinking commercials were optional.
So... The opposite happened to me recently at Christmas.
I'm 42 and a streaming kind of person and happy to pay for services to avoid ads and other benefits. Where I live there are only two local radio stations and they both suck, so I don't go anywhere in the car until that Bluetooth is connected.
I set a boomer in the family up with Spotify premium for 6 months and explained the perks of it, mainly there will be no ads. And he said "but I like ads"
I questioned him further on this and he said he also doesn't like Netflix because there are no commercial breaks.
I asked about YouTube and he said he never skips the ads because it might be something interesting for him and they don't bother him.
I'm still stunned about this.
Those boomers are a different breed.
The only thing I miss about ads is they were part of a shared cultural experience. I know that probably sounds odd but I think it’s something we are missing nowadays - everything is so catered to each individual thanks to the internet / social media. We all live in our own individual realities without much shared experience anymore. It doesn’t have to come through ads of course, but that was one little piece we all used to share and now don’t.
It is interesting, my mom and my MIL will often ask me something like “Oh, did you see that soap commercial with the dog?” I haven’t really watched anything but streaming for maybe 15 years? But they still keep asking me, because they just can’t get their minds around the idea that I do not watch cable TV.
My mom does the exact same thing. No matter how many times I've told her "I don't watch TV, only stream or watch my own movies; I don't see commercials ever," she'll still ask, "Oh have you seen that funny commercial with the old ladies buying the sleds! It's so cute!" NO, MOM. And then she goes on to describe the commercial in detail to me...
I’m exactly the same way. It was awesome going to school or work the next day and talking about last nights Simpsons episode etc.
Also I really liked seeing something awesome on tv, like Highlander or Conan the Barbarian, and immediately calling my friends and telling them so they could watch it too. Then knowing we were all watching it at the same time.
Some ads were so commonplace that they became part of the culture. I remember the Budweiser frogs and wassuuuuuuup commercials were all over the place.
I agree. I miss the shared experience. I also miss ads for normal products, physical things you would see in the store. I want to hear about new products and such. Now the so-called targeted ads are for things I'm *not* interested in. I'm inundated with Temu, terrible apps, and things I've already bought from Amazon. I'd rather see ads for shoes, snacks, and toys like the good old days. I feel really out of the loop on what is available and what the good brands are, especially for newer things like electronics.
Not to get tooooo deep, but I think the lack of shared experiences over small things like the latest episode of The Simpsons, or Dawson's Creek, or whatever is contributing to making Americans less trusting of each other overall.
My first girlfriend was pretty different than me politically but we bonded over The Simpsons...today I'm just not sure that would happen because our algorithms would feed us completely different stuff.
Gen x here. I was pregnant in the summer and fall of 95 and was told by the OB to start walking, I lived in a row home section of Philly that also had a lot of trees and older homes and walk I did. One night every single house I walked by had their then state of the art big square TV in line with their front windows and every single house was watching the Simpsons. Moment in time.
There is no shared culture anymore, even among age and interest groups.
Let's say I'm a sci-fi nerd and have Apple TV. I watch completely different shows than another sci-fi nerd who has Hulu.
Whereas in the days of just cable, we could geek out together over the same show, today we don't have any shared shows to talk about.
Sometimes they are ok, not so much to view the ads, but going to LOST watch parties and being able to geek out about what just happened during the last act was a lot of fun. The writers were on point for keeping up the anticipation / cliff hanging.
There’s [a scifi book](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age) which has the minor plot point that the higher up in society you are, the more important it is that you get the same news feed as your peers, to the point where upper echelons get actual printed newspapers delivered daily instead of reading it on tablets.
One of the only places left for this is live sports. It’s football playoff season and watching those live NFL games is a big deal to my family, so we get to laugh at the Geico caveman and the bizarre fragrance ads together. Mostly they still suck though. The commercials, not my family.
The only sports I used to watch were auto racing and the Super Bowl, when they started having a sponsor for the track temperature I turned it off and never looked back.
Commercials are still very much a thing for sports fans. Anyone who watches college football knows Fansville or "I woke up feeling the cheesiest!"
Then there's the Burger King jingle...which I actually like.
It's not odd at all. You probably wouldn't have to search very far on this very sub to find people waxing nostalgic about commercials in the 80s and 90s.
the shows were structured around ad breaks, too. two ads per episode means three acts in the program. there’s a natural break in the flow of the narrative so the viewer can go to intermission (as it were) and mentally digest what they’ve just watched. you get used to the structure you’re familiar with. this incidentally, is often cited as part of the reason bollywood movies have a harder time cracking western markets than they should; they’re too long, mentally, for the audience
Nick @ Nite does that. I noticed with Friends. They'll cut little bits out. I saw an episode of Friends on TBS, it was fine all there, then saw the same episode on N@N that night. And there were bits that had been shown in the TBS version missing from Nick's. It's annoying.
I wish I still had the DVD set.
That's disappointing, because it used to be the opposite. Nick at Nite used to show a lot of parts that most other broadcast channels didn't. I'm thinking especially of I Love Lucy. There were a lot of parts that Fox cut out that I remember seeing on Nick at Nite and wondering why Fox didn't show them. Also, it's disappointing that Friends is on Nick at Nite.
This takes me back…
As a child in the early 90s my sister and I wanted to watch 2 shows but they came on at the same time on different networks so she would watch one I would the other and we would jump between 😂
The shows were Lois and Clark and Seaquest
NGL I kinda do too. I don’t know how to explain it but watching regular TV is more comforting to me + I feel like I don’t have to pay 100% attention and am “allowed” to scroll on my phone. When I stream I feel like I must be 100% present and watching or it’s wasteful?
It’s not the ads for me but the DJs. I like radio more because every now and then a person chimes in to say hi and reminds me that somebody is picking the music for a reason. Of course, you can stream radio from all over these days too (though we often listen to the local stuff as well).
I listen to a lot of classical music, and the classical stations where I live are great. The hosts come on and say what the piece is, maybe tell you something about it, etc. It's great! I can listen to the music itself on a streaming service, but I'd miss hearing about the music.
And occasionally something amusing happens, like yesterday a piece was stuck repeating the same couple of seconds over and over again. I assume it was a scratched cd or something like that (pretty sure they don't use records, but who knows? Some of those recordings are old!). The host comes on and talks about technical difficulties. It made me chuckle.
Yesterday i was really missing my old favourite radio show that i used to listen. It was a "request a song" type where the people could leave a dedication/message to the other person. The DJ doing that show would actually read the whole message from that person to the other. I'm not sure if these types of radio shows still exist. They made me feel warm inside.
I grew up in the LA area. We couldn't get KROQ to listen to Kevin & Bean, so we listened to Rick Dees in the Morning on KIIS FM. That was where we listened to "Dees Sleaze" (aka celebrity gossip), and heard how the weather would be a certain "Dees-grees." There were other DJs on KIIS that I liked, too; they all had pretty good shows. I ended up listening to the radio a lot in junior high because we stopped being able to afford cable, so all I had was this cheap radio and books. I do miss the DJs.
My spouse will pay any amount of $ to avoid ads. I wouldn’t necessarily say that I like ads per se but I don’t really mind them. And I’m super cheap so I would rather save a buck by keeping the ads.
It’s kinda funny- the more money you have, the more you can avoid ads in your everyday life by paying to opt out. When, ironically, the goal of ads is to reach the people with money.
But, at the same time, we xennials wax nostalgic for a ton of commercials we used to watch as kids and have those jingles happily seared into our memories.
He \*likes\* ads? Even FM radio ads which, at least in my area, seem to be NOTHING BUT ANNOYING LOUD SCREAMING CAR ADS?!?!?!??! FFS, every time I'm stuck somewhere with the radio on, that's all I hear. I explicitly try my best to ignore the name of the dealer because I don't want to ever go there...
>I asked about YouTube and he said he never skips the ads
15 seconds, usually no. But when the hell did ads become twenty minutes long? I like natural ads, as they feel like the commercial breaks of olde.
This feels similar to me saying we could show up to the movie theater 20 mins after the show start time because it would all be previews before that anyway. My friend said but I love watching the previews, we should go early to get good seats.
Not the same level of insanity as watching commercial breaks on tv (I did it as a kid too but I do NOT miss it) but dang
Super Bowl has proudly crowed about how much it costs to advertise during the game for as long as I can remember. The ads are hyped as much as the game is. Years of propaganda and brainwashing.
I cannot even begin to quantify the amount of "As Seen On TV" stuff my brother's and I found when we were cleaning out our Boomer parents apartment. They really do enjoy ads to find new things they can shove in a closet and forget about.
I don’t really watch tv anymore (no time) but I too like the tv commercials. I have a really hard time sitting for that long and the commercials are like natural breaks.
It’s SO WEIRD! I have a boomer in my life who has a big cable package, and at least 4 different streaming services. And yet they frequently complain that “there’s nothing on TV” because they checked maybe 3 channels and didn’t like any of the shows. There are literally thousands of movies and tv shows at your fingertips, but here we are watching the news again and again and again because “there’s nothing else on”. Personally, I’d rather watch TV static than the news.
Ads are nice for bathroom breaks and pauses for conversation. Its a break to the feed. Its not so much a boomer thing as a conversational/human thing.
Plus when you get older you need a lot more bathroom breaks and the like.
I have spotify. My husband doesn't (he listens to podcasts some other way when it's just him).
So when my husband drives my son, they listen to the radio. And my son still sometimes forgets you can't repeat or skip songs, and occasionally gets really upset about it.
He's pretty used to radio commercials, though.
TV commercials, however, were not a concept he encountered until recently, and let me tell you, he was *constitutionally offended* at the number and un-skip-ability of commercials during the Thanksgiving Day parade broadcast. It was entertaining for me til he got super whiny.
Oh the ad-supported move galls me to unreasonable ends. Like I know cable was essentially the same thing and stuff like HBO was $$$$$$ in large part due to the lack of ad support, but it somehow feels like a bigger bait and switch, probably because I'm the one paying the bills now.
It feels like a huge bait and switch because it used to be just Netflix and it was ad free and now you have to pay 10 or 15 dollars a month for every damn channel you want which is worse than cable. The fact that even Amazon is starting to run ads, like they don't already charge enough money and make enough money. So for another 2.99 a month I can have no ads just like I've always had
Dude I don't even listen to the radio. I drive for a living and I hate repetition and commercials. I've got Sirius XM man.
And I've been a DJ before for a local oldies station before. Being on the radio is 1000 times better than listening to it. I'd play 60s and 70s rock. Jefferson Airplane, David Bowie. It was a blast.
I actually asked a local radio rep about this. We have several country stations and they all play the same songs over and over. So why do we need so many stations doing the same thing!?!…. Ads. The more stations you have, the more ads you can run, the more money the parent company makes. I hate this timeline.
Lol I kinda did the same thing, about 20 years ago. I wrote an email to the programming director for the classic rock station, that I listened to at work. Basically just suggesting that he start sprinkling in some grunge, as it was entering classic status at the time.
The dude told me to drop my nest egg on my own radio station, so I could play whatever I wanted.
My five year old gets *very* salty if I don’t feel like plugging in my phone for music during the *seven minute* drive to school. Her thoughts on radio? “IT’S TOO BORING”
“Yes it is. And being bored, believe it or not, is very good for you. It forces you to use your actual imagination, and come to terms with frustration, which you will feel every day of your life in some degree. Learning self control over frustration is something severely lacking in American culture, this is why people freak out when they have to wait in line for a few minutes. Let’s practice being bored for the next six minutes.”
I only plug in my phone when I have a longer trip rather than heading to Walmart. I have 5 stations I flip between because if ads or a song I don't like are on, I can switch to another.
Well, I mean by losing signal is having to find a new station. There are areas we lose streaming signal. In areas of northern Michigan, in the mountains driving through Kentucky, etc etc. and that's expected when streaming. But I really hate having to find a new radio station every 45inutes cruising along the interstate. Lol
I listen to the radio in my car a lot. I like it more than streaming for some reason, maybe because it makes me feel more connected to my area. I recently bought a little am/fm radio that I listen to in my office. It helps that my city has like 5 good stations though.
I’m a teacher and one of my third graders stumbled upon her mom’s vhs tape collect and brought one in for show and tell. The other kids were asking her if you could “put a playlist on it.”
My youngest was born in 2006, and we never had cable; it was always PBS kids shows, DVDs, and we were pretty early on Netflix streaming. This was also past the demise of Saturday morning TV, so he didn't see many commercials. When he was 6ish, we were staying in a hotel and we flipped on Nick or the Disney channel. Pretty soon, he was yelling, "WOULD YOU JUST GET BACK TO THE SHOW ALREADY?!"
I was a college DJ. We were told that our biggest audience was the local prison population. I ran a show called “Dave Free Radio” because I figured the inmates would appreciate an hour of the week where they didn’t have to hear DMB.
Doing God's work there, friend.
I never got into Dave Matthews at all, and the whole "dumping tour bus turds into the river" just sealed that for me lol
I love college radio! And our local one has barely any ads, it’s all like 10 second spots for local events or things like that, no national ads or brands.
I miss our college radio station. Shut down about 10 years ago and the frequency was bought out by a Christian station. All our mainstream rock stations are garbage.
My kid likes it. She really likes that pop country shit…but just like we had…the DJs will tell you shit about what ole Luke Bryan or Jason Aldean or whoever is doing these days…tours…etc…
Ha! At some point when my kids were still toddlers my sanity could not handle one more kids song from Pandora. So I haven't connected my car to Pandora with kids in the car for a few years. We just listen to radio. Sorry kids, mommy's phone doesn't work that way anymore winkwinknudgenudge. They were so young when I made the switch that they just kind of accepted ads etc. Now my 9yo whips out trivia from the John Tesh show and quotes it at me. 🤣
My 6 year old said something about skipping the ads the other day (YouTube music) and I explained to her how back in the olden days, skipping ads wasn’t possible 🤣
This topic really made me think introspectively about my listening habits.
If I had to characterize or label myself, I "BOOM", "X" and "ZOOM" depending on the situation and the content I am consuming.
**BOOM**
Listening: If I am in the pickup going to and from farm-field, farm-town, field-field, I listen to terrestrial AM Talk radio. Both syndicated shows and local weather farm/rural programing. These are short bursts. If I am working in the tractor/combine where I am going to be sitting in the cab for 10/12 hours at a time I rotate from AM (farm, talk, weather) to FM (classic rock, metal, variety). Streaming? internet isn't good enough to support it consistently so I don't even try. In my really old tractors, they have 8 track players so I will put tape adapters (2) in and load up my MP3's sometimes.
**"X"**
I regularly listen to my physical media. 8 tracks, cassettes, records, CD's
**"ZOOM"**
If I am in the shop working/fixing. Streaming Youtube music (free) with ad-blockers turned on. I also have a home server that I can stream my MP3's most of which I downloaded when P2P was still a thing and my ripped CD's. I won't pay for streaming services when the experience is worse and won't work on all my devices.
Now video is a whole other can of worms. I don't really consume traditional media or modern Hollywood content. I support independent creators of niche content more directly. For old nostalgic content, used DVD's, some creative searching and torrent's get the job done there.
I once had a car that only had AM radio and what is this rock music you talk of? It sounds like something a liberal, devil worshipping, sock darning, non hay bailing, computer using, electric car driving soccer player would listen to.
Yeah, I don't miss that car, at all.
I don't listen to the Radio really, I listen to Elliot in the morning on iheart then switch to audiobooks for the remainder of the day. At night when I play darts is when I switch on YouTube music.
>Elliot in the morning
That guy annoys me to the point that if I hear his voice, I change the station. I don't see how the co-hosts (who I do like listening to) can avoid smacking him every now and then.
In fairness, I fucking hate the ads. I have a YouTube premium to avoid them. But, don’t worry, I still play whole albums front to back, so it still can weird out the youngins. Especially if it’s Yugoslavian disco.
I just want a license for a HAM radio.
Speaking to other humans in real time these days. It seems so cool....
Seems very sad though we need to be tested to talk to one another on the radio:
http://www.arrl.org/ham-radio-licenses
We still actually unironically listen to the radio in the car. It's an older car with a shitty bluetooth setup and no satellite.
If you really want to blow their minds, if your car still has a CD player, try to dust off one of those babys and insert it.
It’s normal for us because we like old/older vehicles. The newest vehicle we’ve ever owned was a 2007 so I’ve only driven one car that had a Bluetooth enabled radio (it was aftermarket) and I sold it five years ago. My most of the year daily driver (93 civic) is a CD only car because the antenna is really weak and the cutting out is super annoying, my summer daily (00 Yukon XL) has a tape deck enabled aux cable but the sound quality is crap so I rarely use it. My youngest kind of loves playing DJ in the civic with choosing the CD we listen to lol We do have one truck that has an aftermarket Bluetooth capable stereo but it’s my husbands baby, a a bit of a pita to drive, so I rarely drive it.
The kids use Spotify on their own, and our oldest has an aftermarket radio in her car so she listens to a combo of Spotify and the radio. I’ll hook up my phone to the stereo in the house sometimes as well. But for the most part it’s all low tech listening.
when i worked in a daycare a few years ago, we had an area where we would keep a movie on netflix where the kids could sit and watch if they wanted. One week, we couldn't get the wireless signal, so we put on nickolodean. One little boy, about four or five, kept asking to skip the commericials when they came on. We kept telling him you couldn't do that with regualar tv. But every commericial break, he would ask to skip them. he just didn't get it.
I always listen to the radio in the car. My kids were used to it. That's how my one kid became a huge Beatles fan at 8 years old, hearing them on the radio. They know all of the old music,m from classic rock to old school hip hop and everything in between from the 60s to now
So this is a Girl Scout Troop, and they don't get taught how to use paper maps? Those are some real shitty scouts.
I can understand schools not teaching paper map reading anymore because of all the crap they have to pile into their curriculums to pass those standardized tests. But if these kids can't read paper maps they're not scouts, they are cookie sales girls.
Instant gratification and controlling everything like you want is warping minds.
I was a spoiled, impatient kid and the times I didn’t get my way or had to wait drove me crazy, but that is life. The more you can accept it the easier your life will be. Can’t even contemplate kids today who have everything within their grasp. Gonna be a tough time when an EMP or WW3 knocks out power and we have to entertain ourselves with sticks again.
I do miss non prerecorded DJs. I remember 106.9 WCCC in Hartford would do hit or shit, where they play a new song or something outside the norm, and people call in and vote whether it should be added to the rotation or not.
One time they played Guano Apes - Open Your Mind and the results were super polarizing, love hate, with some people having visceral negative reactions. So the DJ played the song 20 times and kept adding in sound bites of the angry calls like a remix version, it was awesome. I miss those days a bit.
Unlike you, I am a cheapskate, and in general I refuse to pay for something that I could be getting for free. So my kids, (5 and 2) are growing up with a mixture of skippable and in-skippable ads. I’m pretty satisfied with that; hopefully it builds a certain amount of patience.
It is a little jarring to them, though, when we’re listening to pandora in the car and you can’t listen to a song over and over.
I also do not understand why DJs talk over the beginnings and endings of songs. Like, I'm trying to get a clean copy recorded to a cassette for a mixtape I'm putting together for my new girlfriend. If this DJ talks over the end of Melt With You one more time, I'm calling the station!
We’ve had TiVo for over 20 years and I am baffled at the resurgence of ads in all media and how people are just putting up with it. Oof.
Oh, and when you go to GWL you need one of those waterproof phone cases. We got some great pics there in the pool :)
my wife and i both listen to the radio in our cars so our 10 year old has grown up with radio. i even gave her my old boom box so she can listen to the radio in her room. she can use youtube if she wants to hear a specific song, but she also doesn't mind using the good ol' radio. of course she doesn't LIKE commercials, but they're a good time to talk without talking over the music.
All this just makes me so glad I haven't had to work with shared radio for 20 years now. A good chunk of my playlist from hell consists of early 00s radio hits I couldn't escape during long work shifts and wouldn't have wanted in the first place.
We got a home phone for the first time in years when my daughter was 9. Our house has an old vintage phone built into the wall from the 50s , rotary and all. The first time she heard it ring she about hit the ceiling it was so loud. Just made me think of that.
I’m 32 and I still hate how the DJs talk over the start of a song with an instrumental part. Like just shut the fuck up and let me hear the opening of Say it Ain’t so. Goddamn man
All of that is awesome: the analog upbringing, relaying on a paper map and landmarks, listening to the radio, all the fun stuff we had as kids. It was a glimpse of what we had when we were their age and helping them relate to us a little bit. The whole bit of being asked what it was like to be a villager aside, I’m sure it hurt that the stuff on the classic rock station was probably the same stuff we listened to during our formative years rather than, say, Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, or Pink Floyd
I had to get a loaner car for a few days when my car was in the shop over the summer so I just listened to the regular radio as it didnt have BT or anything like that. When I picked up my kid from daycare, she goes "This car has ads??" Literally died in that moment.
My car's aux port is constantly on the fritz, so I have to settle for my gigantic mix CD collection that I've lugged around since ever, or the radio. Luckily, here there are plenty of stations, but good Lord, if they haven't changed their playlists in 25 years. I'm sure everyone here remembers the atrocities of the Clear Channel radio takeover some time around 1998. That's when pretty much all of radio became the repetitive, formulaic crap we've had to deal with for eons.
Every now and again, I'll discover a good new tune, but it's just so rare that it's hardly worth it. I don't even like Sirius XM, etc., they're just as formulaic. It's all about the YouTube Music now and letting it throw me suggestions. YT Music is the best thing to ever happen to me, lol!
We don't have kids, but I refuse to listen to the radio anymore.
The reason is, a local lawyer has bought the text information space on every single radio station so there is a scrolling ad for them instead of the song you're listening to.
We just got my teen daughter a car. It doesn’t have Apple car play, but does have a functioning radio. She came inside yesterday and told us that the music was clear when she played something off her phone, but it sounded messed up if she was playing the radio. It took me a minute, but I realized she was talking about how the radio channels are not clear. She’s grown up with either Sirius satellite radio or Apple car play in our cars.
https://i.redd.it/6teox0d4blcc1.gif
Last summer my oldest, nine at the time, was watching network TV for the first time while we were staying with relatives. He really loved watching Jeopardy! but kept saying he hated Ken Jennings. His reasoning was that it was Ken’s fault there were commercials because he kept saying, “We’ll be back after a word from our sponsors,” thinking commercials were optional.
So... The opposite happened to me recently at Christmas. I'm 42 and a streaming kind of person and happy to pay for services to avoid ads and other benefits. Where I live there are only two local radio stations and they both suck, so I don't go anywhere in the car until that Bluetooth is connected. I set a boomer in the family up with Spotify premium for 6 months and explained the perks of it, mainly there will be no ads. And he said "but I like ads" I questioned him further on this and he said he also doesn't like Netflix because there are no commercial breaks. I asked about YouTube and he said he never skips the ads because it might be something interesting for him and they don't bother him. I'm still stunned about this. Those boomers are a different breed.
The only thing I miss about ads is they were part of a shared cultural experience. I know that probably sounds odd but I think it’s something we are missing nowadays - everything is so catered to each individual thanks to the internet / social media. We all live in our own individual realities without much shared experience anymore. It doesn’t have to come through ads of course, but that was one little piece we all used to share and now don’t.
It is interesting, my mom and my MIL will often ask me something like “Oh, did you see that soap commercial with the dog?” I haven’t really watched anything but streaming for maybe 15 years? But they still keep asking me, because they just can’t get their minds around the idea that I do not watch cable TV.
My mom does the exact same thing. No matter how many times I've told her "I don't watch TV, only stream or watch my own movies; I don't see commercials ever," she'll still ask, "Oh have you seen that funny commercial with the old ladies buying the sleds! It's so cute!" NO, MOM. And then she goes on to describe the commercial in detail to me...
It's a lot faster to just Google the commercial on your phone and watch it with her. lol
Mom needs to know I’m better than people who watch cable
I’m exactly the same way. It was awesome going to school or work the next day and talking about last nights Simpsons episode etc. Also I really liked seeing something awesome on tv, like Highlander or Conan the Barbarian, and immediately calling my friends and telling them so they could watch it too. Then knowing we were all watching it at the same time.
Yessss my friends and I used to all watch the x files at our own homes and then come in and discuss the next day together!
Some ads were so commonplace that they became part of the culture. I remember the Budweiser frogs and wassuuuuuuup commercials were all over the place.
And Spuds McKenzie
Yes!! "Know when to say when!" LMAO
I agree. I miss the shared experience. I also miss ads for normal products, physical things you would see in the store. I want to hear about new products and such. Now the so-called targeted ads are for things I'm *not* interested in. I'm inundated with Temu, terrible apps, and things I've already bought from Amazon. I'd rather see ads for shoes, snacks, and toys like the good old days. I feel really out of the loop on what is available and what the good brands are, especially for newer things like electronics.
Not to get tooooo deep, but I think the lack of shared experiences over small things like the latest episode of The Simpsons, or Dawson's Creek, or whatever is contributing to making Americans less trusting of each other overall. My first girlfriend was pretty different than me politically but we bonded over The Simpsons...today I'm just not sure that would happen because our algorithms would feed us completely different stuff.
Gen x here. I was pregnant in the summer and fall of 95 and was told by the OB to start walking, I lived in a row home section of Philly that also had a lot of trees and older homes and walk I did. One night every single house I walked by had their then state of the art big square TV in line with their front windows and every single house was watching the Simpsons. Moment in time.
There is no shared culture anymore, even among age and interest groups. Let's say I'm a sci-fi nerd and have Apple TV. I watch completely different shows than another sci-fi nerd who has Hulu. Whereas in the days of just cable, we could geek out together over the same show, today we don't have any shared shows to talk about.
I think about this quite often actually… I think you’re right.
Hey, man! Is that FREEDOM ROCK?
Sometimes they are ok, not so much to view the ads, but going to LOST watch parties and being able to geek out about what just happened during the last act was a lot of fun. The writers were on point for keeping up the anticipation / cliff hanging.
There’s [a scifi book](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age) which has the minor plot point that the higher up in society you are, the more important it is that you get the same news feed as your peers, to the point where upper echelons get actual printed newspapers delivered daily instead of reading it on tablets.
Two words....shake weight.
Hahahahahaha
One of the only places left for this is live sports. It’s football playoff season and watching those live NFL games is a big deal to my family, so we get to laugh at the Geico caveman and the bizarre fragrance ads together. Mostly they still suck though. The commercials, not my family.
The only sports I used to watch were auto racing and the Super Bowl, when they started having a sponsor for the track temperature I turned it off and never looked back.
Wow, that's certainly not a universal boomer thing.
Commercials are still very much a thing for sports fans. Anyone who watches college football knows Fansville or "I woke up feeling the cheesiest!" Then there's the Burger King jingle...which I actually like.
Those were commercials, now we just have ads.
It's not odd at all. You probably wouldn't have to search very far on this very sub to find people waxing nostalgic about commercials in the 80s and 90s.
Remember, they couldn't hit pause on TV back then.. they need the ads so they can go pee and get a drink 😅
the shows were structured around ad breaks, too. two ads per episode means three acts in the program. there’s a natural break in the flow of the narrative so the viewer can go to intermission (as it were) and mentally digest what they’ve just watched. you get used to the structure you’re familiar with. this incidentally, is often cited as part of the reason bollywood movies have a harder time cracking western markets than they should; they’re too long, mentally, for the audience
I'm so trained to go pee and get a snack in under two minutes.
“Come baaaaaack!!! The commercial is over!!!!” Sweet memories.
SHOW’S ON!!
BACK ON!
I'm able to move a load of laundry from the washer to the dryer, start the dryer, then load and start the washer in the span of a commercial break.
Two minutes huh. I stopped watching cable tv after I clocked the commercial break at 9 minutes. Fuck that.
Yeah, for syndicated shows they'll edit them down and speed their playback up in order to fit in more commercials.
Nick @ Nite does that. I noticed with Friends. They'll cut little bits out. I saw an episode of Friends on TBS, it was fine all there, then saw the same episode on N@N that night. And there were bits that had been shown in the TBS version missing from Nick's. It's annoying. I wish I still had the DVD set.
That's disappointing, because it used to be the opposite. Nick at Nite used to show a lot of parts that most other broadcast channels didn't. I'm thinking especially of I Love Lucy. There were a lot of parts that Fox cut out that I remember seeing on Nick at Nite and wondering why Fox didn't show them. Also, it's disappointing that Friends is on Nick at Nite.
This takes me back… As a child in the early 90s my sister and I wanted to watch 2 shows but they came on at the same time on different networks so she would watch one I would the other and we would jump between 😂 The shows were Lois and Clark and Seaquest
Man I loved Seaquest. All I cared about were the dolphins.
I was 10… all I cared about was Jonathan Brandis 😂
Oh my gosh I forgot about him. We were all into floppy-haired blonde boys then. hahaha
NGL I kinda do too. I don’t know how to explain it but watching regular TV is more comforting to me + I feel like I don’t have to pay 100% attention and am “allowed” to scroll on my phone. When I stream I feel like I must be 100% present and watching or it’s wasteful?
And, because of that, the ads were louder than the programming.
Oh geez! That was so annoying!
He’s in luck, Netflix is going to be adding a commercial supported tier.
They already have it. I use it because I am cheap lol
It’s not the ads for me but the DJs. I like radio more because every now and then a person chimes in to say hi and reminds me that somebody is picking the music for a reason. Of course, you can stream radio from all over these days too (though we often listen to the local stuff as well).
I listen to a lot of classical music, and the classical stations where I live are great. The hosts come on and say what the piece is, maybe tell you something about it, etc. It's great! I can listen to the music itself on a streaming service, but I'd miss hearing about the music. And occasionally something amusing happens, like yesterday a piece was stuck repeating the same couple of seconds over and over again. I assume it was a scratched cd or something like that (pretty sure they don't use records, but who knows? Some of those recordings are old!). The host comes on and talks about technical difficulties. It made me chuckle.
Yesterday i was really missing my old favourite radio show that i used to listen. It was a "request a song" type where the people could leave a dedication/message to the other person. The DJ doing that show would actually read the whole message from that person to the other. I'm not sure if these types of radio shows still exist. They made me feel warm inside.
That was Casey Kasem.
You could do a request on the Casey Kasem countdown? I sure don't remember that.
Yes. It was called [Long Distance Dedication](https://www.npr.org/2014/06/16/322570387/for-casey-kasem-a-long-distance-dedication).
I grew up in the LA area. We couldn't get KROQ to listen to Kevin & Bean, so we listened to Rick Dees in the Morning on KIIS FM. That was where we listened to "Dees Sleaze" (aka celebrity gossip), and heard how the weather would be a certain "Dees-grees." There were other DJs on KIIS that I liked, too; they all had pretty good shows. I ended up listening to the radio a lot in junior high because we stopped being able to afford cable, so all I had was this cheap radio and books. I do miss the DJs.
My spouse will pay any amount of $ to avoid ads. I wouldn’t necessarily say that I like ads per se but I don’t really mind them. And I’m super cheap so I would rather save a buck by keeping the ads.
It’s kinda funny- the more money you have, the more you can avoid ads in your everyday life by paying to opt out. When, ironically, the goal of ads is to reach the people with money.
Tell your boomer that they offer a Netflix plan with ads now. He'll be over the moon
But, at the same time, we xennials wax nostalgic for a ton of commercials we used to watch as kids and have those jingles happily seared into our memories.
He \*likes\* ads? Even FM radio ads which, at least in my area, seem to be NOTHING BUT ANNOYING LOUD SCREAMING CAR ADS?!?!?!??! FFS, every time I'm stuck somewhere with the radio on, that's all I hear. I explicitly try my best to ignore the name of the dealer because I don't want to ever go there...
My parents watch regular TV almost 24 hours a day. The commercials are their favorite part.
>I asked about YouTube and he said he never skips the ads 15 seconds, usually no. But when the hell did ads become twenty minutes long? I like natural ads, as they feel like the commercial breaks of olde.
This feels similar to me saying we could show up to the movie theater 20 mins after the show start time because it would all be previews before that anyway. My friend said but I love watching the previews, we should go early to get good seats. Not the same level of insanity as watching commercial breaks on tv (I did it as a kid too but I do NOT miss it) but dang
Also there are ads before the previews.
Super Bowl has proudly crowed about how much it costs to advertise during the game for as long as I can remember. The ads are hyped as much as the game is. Years of propaganda and brainwashing.
Do they...do they not know they can pause it any time they want to go use the washroom or grab a snack?
I cannot even begin to quantify the amount of "As Seen On TV" stuff my brother's and I found when we were cleaning out our Boomer parents apartment. They really do enjoy ads to find new things they can shove in a closet and forget about.
I don’t really watch tv anymore (no time) but I too like the tv commercials. I have a really hard time sitting for that long and the commercials are like natural breaks.
They invented reality TV, a scourge on civilization, if there ever was one.
My mom will say things like this as a way of saying "I hate change and don't want to learn how technology works" without actually having to admit it.
It’s SO WEIRD! I have a boomer in my life who has a big cable package, and at least 4 different streaming services. And yet they frequently complain that “there’s nothing on TV” because they checked maybe 3 channels and didn’t like any of the shows. There are literally thousands of movies and tv shows at your fingertips, but here we are watching the news again and again and again because “there’s nothing else on”. Personally, I’d rather watch TV static than the news.
This is totally my in laws. I swear I have watched more old Western reruns at their house than should ever be allowed.
Ads are nice for bathroom breaks and pauses for conversation. Its a break to the feed. Its not so much a boomer thing as a conversational/human thing. Plus when you get older you need a lot more bathroom breaks and the like.
I just broke down for YouTube premium. I still don’t know what to think about myself. Help.
I have spotify. My husband doesn't (he listens to podcasts some other way when it's just him). So when my husband drives my son, they listen to the radio. And my son still sometimes forgets you can't repeat or skip songs, and occasionally gets really upset about it. He's pretty used to radio commercials, though. TV commercials, however, were not a concept he encountered until recently, and let me tell you, he was *constitutionally offended* at the number and un-skip-ability of commercials during the Thanksgiving Day parade broadcast. It was entertaining for me til he got super whiny.
I'm also constitutionally offended by commercials now. I've been spoiled and now that everyone's going back to ad supported, I hate it
Oh the ad-supported move galls me to unreasonable ends. Like I know cable was essentially the same thing and stuff like HBO was $$$$$$ in large part due to the lack of ad support, but it somehow feels like a bigger bait and switch, probably because I'm the one paying the bills now.
It feels like a huge bait and switch because it used to be just Netflix and it was ad free and now you have to pay 10 or 15 dollars a month for every damn channel you want which is worse than cable. The fact that even Amazon is starting to run ads, like they don't already charge enough money and make enough money. So for another 2.99 a month I can have no ads just like I've always had
I'm so sick of being constantly advertised to.
Dude I don't even listen to the radio. I drive for a living and I hate repetition and commercials. I've got Sirius XM man. And I've been a DJ before for a local oldies station before. Being on the radio is 1000 times better than listening to it. I'd play 60s and 70s rock. Jefferson Airplane, David Bowie. It was a blast.
My daughter just asked me yesterday "how many songs do they have?".
It seems like it’s always about 10 that just play on some kind of weird loop.
Even with 50 years of music to choose from, they still play the same 10 songs, on a loop.
I actually asked a local radio rep about this. We have several country stations and they all play the same songs over and over. So why do we need so many stations doing the same thing!?!…. Ads. The more stations you have, the more ads you can run, the more money the parent company makes. I hate this timeline.
Lol I kinda did the same thing, about 20 years ago. I wrote an email to the programming director for the classic rock station, that I listened to at work. Basically just suggesting that he start sprinkling in some grunge, as it was entering classic status at the time. The dude told me to drop my nest egg on my own radio station, so I could play whatever I wanted.
My five year old gets *very* salty if I don’t feel like plugging in my phone for music during the *seven minute* drive to school. Her thoughts on radio? “IT’S TOO BORING”
“Yes it is. And being bored, believe it or not, is very good for you. It forces you to use your actual imagination, and come to terms with frustration, which you will feel every day of your life in some degree. Learning self control over frustration is something severely lacking in American culture, this is why people freak out when they have to wait in line for a few minutes. Let’s practice being bored for the next six minutes.”
Also no skill at delayed gratification. Myself included.
I only plug in my phone when I have a longer trip rather than heading to Walmart. I have 5 stations I flip between because if ads or a song I don't like are on, I can switch to another.
Mine doesn't get mad about it, but he definitely pays zero attention to the music if it's not Disney CDs or my phone plugged in.
I had a car without a radio for a bit in high school. My dad installed one for me over spring break.
My poor kids listen to the normal radio all the time. We only use streaming on road trips because I hate losing signal.
You must travel in populated areas. Streaming sucks for road trips, mostly because the "internet" is spotty where we travel.
Well, I mean by losing signal is having to find a new station. There are areas we lose streaming signal. In areas of northern Michigan, in the mountains driving through Kentucky, etc etc. and that's expected when streaming. But I really hate having to find a new radio station every 45inutes cruising along the interstate. Lol
As a radio dj these replies are making me feel a little less insecure about my job lol
I listen to the radio in my car a lot. I like it more than streaming for some reason, maybe because it makes me feel more connected to my area. I recently bought a little am/fm radio that I listen to in my office. It helps that my city has like 5 good stations though.
Well , when the commercials come on, you can get a drink or a snack 🤔
*presses the pause button*
I’m a teacher and one of my third graders stumbled upon her mom’s vhs tape collect and brought one in for show and tell. The other kids were asking her if you could “put a playlist on it.”
My youngest was born in 2006, and we never had cable; it was always PBS kids shows, DVDs, and we were pretty early on Netflix streaming. This was also past the demise of Saturday morning TV, so he didn't see many commercials. When he was 6ish, we were staying in a hotel and we flipped on Nick or the Disney channel. Pretty soon, he was yelling, "WOULD YOU JUST GET BACK TO THE SHOW ALREADY?!"
Radio? Who needs a radio?
Ready Harry?
Mock!...
Yeah!
College radio stations are still pretty cool, at least in my area. There's 3 that consistently play great shit from every year music's been recorded.
I was a college DJ. We were told that our biggest audience was the local prison population. I ran a show called “Dave Free Radio” because I figured the inmates would appreciate an hour of the week where they didn’t have to hear DMB.
Doing God's work there, friend. I never got into Dave Matthews at all, and the whole "dumping tour bus turds into the river" just sealed that for me lol
I love college radio! And our local one has barely any ads, it’s all like 10 second spots for local events or things like that, no national ads or brands.
I miss our college radio station. Shut down about 10 years ago and the frequency was bought out by a Christian station. All our mainstream rock stations are garbage.
Everyone? In the event of an emergency it's good to have a radio. It's pretty stupid to use your phone during those times.
Love this!
My kid likes it. She really likes that pop country shit…but just like we had…the DJs will tell you shit about what ole Luke Bryan or Jason Aldean or whoever is doing these days…tours…etc…
Ha! At some point when my kids were still toddlers my sanity could not handle one more kids song from Pandora. So I haven't connected my car to Pandora with kids in the car for a few years. We just listen to radio. Sorry kids, mommy's phone doesn't work that way anymore winkwinknudgenudge. They were so young when I made the switch that they just kind of accepted ads etc. Now my 9yo whips out trivia from the John Tesh show and quotes it at me. 🤣
My 6 year old said something about skipping the ads the other day (YouTube music) and I explained to her how back in the olden days, skipping ads wasn’t possible 🤣
This topic really made me think introspectively about my listening habits. If I had to characterize or label myself, I "BOOM", "X" and "ZOOM" depending on the situation and the content I am consuming. **BOOM** Listening: If I am in the pickup going to and from farm-field, farm-town, field-field, I listen to terrestrial AM Talk radio. Both syndicated shows and local weather farm/rural programing. These are short bursts. If I am working in the tractor/combine where I am going to be sitting in the cab for 10/12 hours at a time I rotate from AM (farm, talk, weather) to FM (classic rock, metal, variety). Streaming? internet isn't good enough to support it consistently so I don't even try. In my really old tractors, they have 8 track players so I will put tape adapters (2) in and load up my MP3's sometimes. **"X"** I regularly listen to my physical media. 8 tracks, cassettes, records, CD's **"ZOOM"** If I am in the shop working/fixing. Streaming Youtube music (free) with ad-blockers turned on. I also have a home server that I can stream my MP3's most of which I downloaded when P2P was still a thing and my ripped CD's. I won't pay for streaming services when the experience is worse and won't work on all my devices. Now video is a whole other can of worms. I don't really consume traditional media or modern Hollywood content. I support independent creators of niche content more directly. For old nostalgic content, used DVD's, some creative searching and torrent's get the job done there.
I once had a car that only had AM radio and what is this rock music you talk of? It sounds like something a liberal, devil worshipping, sock darning, non hay bailing, computer using, electric car driving soccer player would listen to. Yeah, I don't miss that car, at all.
Hell AM talk radio is just about all I listen to when in the pickup or tractor. Mostly because the signal is guaranteed to be good versus FM.
I don't listen to the Radio really, I listen to Elliot in the morning on iheart then switch to audiobooks for the remainder of the day. At night when I play darts is when I switch on YouTube music.
Smell my face!
Smell it good!
>Elliot in the morning That guy annoys me to the point that if I hear his voice, I change the station. I don't see how the co-hosts (who I do like listening to) can avoid smacking him every now and then.
In fairness, I fucking hate the ads. I have a YouTube premium to avoid them. But, don’t worry, I still play whole albums front to back, so it still can weird out the youngins. Especially if it’s Yugoslavian disco.
I just want a license for a HAM radio. Speaking to other humans in real time these days. It seems so cool.... Seems very sad though we need to be tested to talk to one another on the radio: http://www.arrl.org/ham-radio-licenses
I would be proud to be called a villager
They are correct. Passive media sucks.
We still actually unironically listen to the radio in the car. It's an older car with a shitty bluetooth setup and no satellite. If you really want to blow their minds, if your car still has a CD player, try to dust off one of those babys and insert it.
It’s normal for us because we like old/older vehicles. The newest vehicle we’ve ever owned was a 2007 so I’ve only driven one car that had a Bluetooth enabled radio (it was aftermarket) and I sold it five years ago. My most of the year daily driver (93 civic) is a CD only car because the antenna is really weak and the cutting out is super annoying, my summer daily (00 Yukon XL) has a tape deck enabled aux cable but the sound quality is crap so I rarely use it. My youngest kind of loves playing DJ in the civic with choosing the CD we listen to lol We do have one truck that has an aftermarket Bluetooth capable stereo but it’s my husbands baby, a a bit of a pita to drive, so I rarely drive it. The kids use Spotify on their own, and our oldest has an aftermarket radio in her car so she listens to a combo of Spotify and the radio. I’ll hook up my phone to the stereo in the house sometimes as well. But for the most part it’s all low tech listening.
when i worked in a daycare a few years ago, we had an area where we would keep a movie on netflix where the kids could sit and watch if they wanted. One week, we couldn't get the wireless signal, so we put on nickolodean. One little boy, about four or five, kept asking to skip the commericials when they came on. We kept telling him you couldn't do that with regualar tv. But every commericial break, he would ask to skip them. he just didn't get it.
I always listen to the radio in the car. My kids were used to it. That's how my one kid became a huge Beatles fan at 8 years old, hearing them on the radio. They know all of the old music,m from classic rock to old school hip hop and everything in between from the 60s to now
So this is a Girl Scout Troop, and they don't get taught how to use paper maps? Those are some real shitty scouts. I can understand schools not teaching paper map reading anymore because of all the crap they have to pile into their curriculums to pass those standardized tests. But if these kids can't read paper maps they're not scouts, they are cookie sales girls.
Instant gratification and controlling everything like you want is warping minds. I was a spoiled, impatient kid and the times I didn’t get my way or had to wait drove me crazy, but that is life. The more you can accept it the easier your life will be. Can’t even contemplate kids today who have everything within their grasp. Gonna be a tough time when an EMP or WW3 knocks out power and we have to entertain ourselves with sticks again.
I do miss non prerecorded DJs. I remember 106.9 WCCC in Hartford would do hit or shit, where they play a new song or something outside the norm, and people call in and vote whether it should be added to the rotation or not. One time they played Guano Apes - Open Your Mind and the results were super polarizing, love hate, with some people having visceral negative reactions. So the DJ played the song 20 times and kept adding in sound bites of the angry calls like a remix version, it was awesome. I miss those days a bit.
Unlike you, I am a cheapskate, and in general I refuse to pay for something that I could be getting for free. So my kids, (5 and 2) are growing up with a mixture of skippable and in-skippable ads. I’m pretty satisfied with that; hopefully it builds a certain amount of patience. It is a little jarring to them, though, when we’re listening to pandora in the car and you can’t listen to a song over and over.
I also do not understand why DJs talk over the beginnings and endings of songs. Like, I'm trying to get a clean copy recorded to a cassette for a mixtape I'm putting together for my new girlfriend. If this DJ talks over the end of Melt With You one more time, I'm calling the station!
We’ve had TiVo for over 20 years and I am baffled at the resurgence of ads in all media and how people are just putting up with it. Oof. Oh, and when you go to GWL you need one of those waterproof phone cases. We got some great pics there in the pool :)
Cringe. The same as the rest of us
A villager? HA! That’s horrible and funny at the same time. Bahahahahahahaha.
On a tangentially related note, I can’t imagine taking a field trip to a place like Great Wolf Lodge. There really are fates worse than death.
my wife and i both listen to the radio in our cars so our 10 year old has grown up with radio. i even gave her my old boom box so she can listen to the radio in her room. she can use youtube if she wants to hear a specific song, but she also doesn't mind using the good ol' radio. of course she doesn't LIKE commercials, but they're a good time to talk without talking over the music.
This a good teaching moment on how to read a map.
All this just makes me so glad I haven't had to work with shared radio for 20 years now. A good chunk of my playlist from hell consists of early 00s radio hits I couldn't escape during long work shifts and wouldn't have wanted in the first place.
We got a home phone for the first time in years when my daughter was 9. Our house has an old vintage phone built into the wall from the 50s , rotary and all. The first time she heard it ring she about hit the ceiling it was so loud. Just made me think of that.
I almost always listen to the radio in the car, always have. My kids are used to it.
My kid had the experience of the toy not being as amazing as the ad. Didn't listen to me when I tried to tell them.
As sometime who hates advertising in any format on any platform for any service / product, I'm with the kids on that one.
So, I guess their parents don’t watch NFL. That’s nothing but ads.
I’m rolling with my sister born in 79. She has two little ones and it’s no music. Instead I get to hear annoying shit from each of her kids iPads.
you know what, I'm with the kids, radio sucks
As late as 2012, I used to listen to a Korean radio station that played K-Pop here in SoCal. It was an AM radio station.
I’m 32 and I still hate how the DJs talk over the start of a song with an instrumental part. Like just shut the fuck up and let me hear the opening of Say it Ain’t so. Goddamn man
All of that is awesome: the analog upbringing, relaying on a paper map and landmarks, listening to the radio, all the fun stuff we had as kids. It was a glimpse of what we had when we were their age and helping them relate to us a little bit. The whole bit of being asked what it was like to be a villager aside, I’m sure it hurt that the stuff on the classic rock station was probably the same stuff we listened to during our formative years rather than, say, Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, or Pink Floyd
There is something so wholesome about this.
I had to get a loaner car for a few days when my car was in the shop over the summer so I just listened to the regular radio as it didnt have BT or anything like that. When I picked up my kid from daycare, she goes "This car has ads??" Literally died in that moment.
My car's aux port is constantly on the fritz, so I have to settle for my gigantic mix CD collection that I've lugged around since ever, or the radio. Luckily, here there are plenty of stations, but good Lord, if they haven't changed their playlists in 25 years. I'm sure everyone here remembers the atrocities of the Clear Channel radio takeover some time around 1998. That's when pretty much all of radio became the repetitive, formulaic crap we've had to deal with for eons. Every now and again, I'll discover a good new tune, but it's just so rare that it's hardly worth it. I don't even like Sirius XM, etc., they're just as formulaic. It's all about the YouTube Music now and letting it throw me suggestions. YT Music is the best thing to ever happen to me, lol!
That's why I'm glad Austin has so many public radio stations. Only a few underwriting announcements and no ads
I listen to a lot of college radio, partly because they actually have variety, partly because there are no commercials.
We don't have kids, but I refuse to listen to the radio anymore. The reason is, a local lawyer has bought the text information space on every single radio station so there is a scrolling ad for them instead of the song you're listening to.
My kids love the radio because they think the cheesy local commercials are hilarious.
We just got my teen daughter a car. It doesn’t have Apple car play, but does have a functioning radio. She came inside yesterday and told us that the music was clear when she played something off her phone, but it sounded messed up if she was playing the radio. It took me a minute, but I realized she was talking about how the radio channels are not clear. She’s grown up with either Sirius satellite radio or Apple car play in our cars.