By Dan Brown 

Once upon a time, subscriptions were a rare thing. But today it feels like every bloody product and/or service works according to a subscription model.

And what I’m sensing is people are not thrilled with this shift.

Back in the old days, by which I mean the 1970s/1980s, you could get subscriptions to a finite list of items.

For example, as a young superhero fan I had a subscription to only one comic, Captain Canuck. I took this extraordinary (for me) step because it was the one title I never wanted to miss. 

Since I mostly bought comics off spinner racks (one in the stationery place in Sherwood Forest Mall, the other at the variety store in Westown Plaza Mall), the risk I took was that if I didn’t go often enough, I would miss the latest issue of my favourite comics. Hence I became a subscriber at a young age.

Dedicated comic stores were still a few years off for me. They based their sales model on each customer’s individual pull list, which is just another kind of comic subscription.

My brother and I had gift subscriptions to Omni, the sci-fi magazine, from a favourite aunt and uncle, as well as to Owl, the children’s equivalent of National Geographic. They arrived at our house every month through the mail. It seemed like some kind of dark magic was at work.

At about the same time, when I was attending elementary school, my first job was delivering the London Free Press to the subscribers in Poplar Hill who read Southwestern Ontario’s daily newspaper. My parents also took the Freeps.

And that was just about the extent of the subscriptions in my life.

When cable television came along, it wasn’t a factor for me because our tiny hometown wouldn’t get any kind of service for decades. 

But if we fast-forward to the early 1990s, with my family then living in neighbouring Coldstream, there was a kind of subscription service that changed my world because it exposed me to such a wide variety of TV shows and content. I’m talking about the old gigantic grey-market satellite dishes.

Once the dish was installed, every month our family would receive the new codes to descramble the signals beaming networks like the Comedy Channel, HBO, and Cinemax to our backyard. It was a Golden Age. I watched so many movies, it became my own version of film school.

Was it entirely legal? Probably not. Did exposure to so many classic movies expand my imagination? You bet.

When I moved to Toronto to attend journalism school, then later Saint John for work, I was abused by almost every cable company you can name. And by this point the idea of paying by monthly instalments had become firmly entrenched in all of our lives.  

Now leap ahead in time to 2026. Everyone who has a cellphone has to pay a monthly fee. Such music-streaming services as Spotify work the same way, as do Netflix, Disney+, and YouTube Premium.

M’Lady and I pay for monthly services like our home digital assistant, our internet, even a farm share that provides us with in-season produce in the warmer months.

You can also get car maintenance by subscription, as well as makeup, clothing, meal kits, craft beer, cloud storage, car washes, Peloton, daycare, museums, house cleaning, MasterClasses, and wine.

I get the business imperative: The companies behind all of these products and services have established a revenue stream that never runs out. But if you’re feeble-minded like me, you might be having a hard time keeping track of all the things you subscribe to.

Someone needs to come up with an app that helps consumers make sure they pay all of their subscriptions every thirty days. 

And of course you’ll pay for it – one month at a time.

Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 33 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly Graphic-Novel Group.