This broadcast will explore subscription music clubs, a bygone mail-order business model which offered consumers the chance to build music collections on the cheap from the comfort of their homes, but with just a few strings attached. The broadcast features an interview with Larry Miller, an NYU Steinhardt professor, a technology entrepreneur, corporate strategy and investment consultant, and host of the Musonomics podcast. No Doubt's Tragic Kingdom, released in October 1995 at the height of the music club phenomenon, will be featured. The band's two-year run of hit singles helped land the album in the top 15 all-time bestsellers from BMG Music Club. Using Tragic Kingdom as an entry point, we will consider how the music clubs molded listeners -- particularly young listeners -- into a buying public, giving them the sense of cultivating individual taste while driving a CD boom. We will listen to some other acts that help us understand the relationship between clubs and artists, the value of music, and what it all means looking back from the streaming age.

Playlist
1. No Doubt - Just a Girl
2. No Doubt - Spiderwebs
3. No Doubt - Sunday Morning
4. Janet Jackson - If
5. Alanis Morissette - You Oughta Know
6. Veruca Salt - Seether
7. No Doubt - End It On This

Music does not just exist. It exists in specific times and places, and in the sonic world of each individual listener who engages with it. That’s the basic idea behind "Music in Time," which explores the social and political context in which songs and albums emerge, are listened to, and reflected on over the years. Each broadcast will focus on a single album, detailing the social and political circumstances surrounding its release and moments in time that made certain music resonate anew. How is music shaped by these historical moments, and, in turn, how does it shape the histories that we remember?

By day, Evan McCormick is a historian at Columbia University, where he is part of the Obama Presidency Oral History project, interviewing a range of people — from cabinet members to ordinary folks — about their memories of the Obama years. By night McCormick is a music lover and singer-songwriter, recording under the stage name Egan Caufield. For most of his life these two worlds remained separate, but after relocating to Catskill, in 2020, he chose to bring history and music together over the airwaves, and Music in Time was born.