All this lamentation of youth's lack of respect or interest is as old
as humankind itself, and remains a self-indulgent delusion:
    "I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent
    on the frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are
    reckless beyond words.  When I was a boy, we were taught to be
    discreet and respectful of elders, but the present youth are
    exceedingly wise and impatient of restraint."
   (Hesiod, c.700 BC)

Society actually progresses because of this; it's a strength born of
natural selection.  Liking different music is just part of an innate
distancing of the generations, always has been (think what folks said
of ragtime and jazz, the devil's music).  Complaining about this is
just a sign of getting old without gaining wisdom, I'm afraid.

Youth is resented because it's wasted on the young and because it
cannot be regained, and so on.  Accept this and join the ride.  Hesiod
was talking about youth who were actually building up to what is often
thought as the Golden Age of Civilisation in ancient Greece.  How wrong
he was!

The best way to prevent youth from joining our hobby?  Complaining
about youth not joining the hobby!  It hardly makes a compelling sales
pitch.  The mechanical music hobby can be fairly off-putting if we
spend too much time on introspective faux-nostalgia and too little time
on working out how to convey the positives to the uncommitted.

The likely positives in the hobby change with time: firstly these
machines played contemporary music, then they played nostalgic music,
now they play ancient music.  The number of interested folks is quite
obviously going to drop.

Maybe we've hitched ourselves to a dying sideline that cannot be re-
vived.  Maybe not.  If we assume it's doomed, then it's doomed because
we'll make sure that's what happens.  "Accentuate the positive, elimi-
nate the negative," as a song that soon nobody will remember once said.
Let's learn from it while we do remember.

Julian Dyer