Dead formats,living futures: Speculative nostalgia and the MiniDisc

Abstract

This paper examines the contemporary revival of Sony’s MiniDisc format through the lens of ‘speculative nostalgia’, a mode of engagement with obsolete technologies that activates unfinished or ‘lost’ futures rather than recreating past experiences. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with music industry professionals and analysis of online communities, the research demonstrates how MiniDisc users frame engagement with this ‘failed’ technology as symbolic resistance to frictionless consumption in an algorithmic culture. Unlike vinyl’s commercial resurgence or cassette culture’s established nostalgia markets, the MiniDisc occupies a marginal space at the fringes of market logics, enabling practices that imagine alternative pathways for media engagement. Its hybrid materiality–both physical and digital–produces productive friction that interrupts the continuous flow of streaming. The paper contributes to format theory and nostalgia studies by arguing that technological failure offers alternative cultural possibilities through embodied, material and ritualistic music practices that challenge the logics of platform capitalism.

Keywords

Algorithmic culture cultural materialism format theory MiniDisc obsolete media platform capitalism speculative nostalgia

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