Bright-pink Barbie CDs, American standards and physical media

There is a neon green CD storage box back in my childhood home in Indonesia. Some discs in the pile are more worn than others; their edges have faded white, and the screen-printed labels on top are practically illegible. I remember the careful way in which my dad would demonstrate holding a disc: by its edges or center, but never by the shiny parts.

Physical media were always central to my childhood memories. I used to race with my sister to find Nintendo cartridges of Harvest Moon and insert Jay Chou cassette tapes into my dad’s stereo player. Most of all, though, I remember the crappy 20-cent Barbie DVDs that my parents would buy from a nearby market after their late-night shifts. The sheer amount of Barbie CDs that decorated the shelves of every CD store back then meant that Barbie dom