Okay, the general line of the joke is clear enough. But what really are the respective methods they are using, and contrasting? Is Arlo using Shazam on a laptop? Using the laptop to view the radio station’s website to find their “now playing” widget? Or is that laptop doing the streaming and he is checking the streaming service? Is Janis using anything besides Google and Wikipedia? How did she know what to look up?
P.S. The ArloAndJanis.com web page is still not providing any content.
Further P.S. The next day’s strip was sort of a sequel.
Comics I Don't Understand 
Arlo’s leaping to stop the record on their phonogram and read the label for the artist credit. Janis, being considerably more worldly, grabs her phone and uses Shazam or Soundhound or some such to identify the song and find more production details than she cares to know online, while Arlo is still waiting for the platter to slow down from its 33 1/3 rpm.
I agree with U.V. in principle, especially about what Janis is doing (which is why she has more data to report), but I don’t see a record player anywhere in this strip. I think the sound system is being driven by that laptop on that cabinet, and Arlo was running to check the “current track” in the playlist on the screen.
P.S. Running, of course, for two reasons: to get there before the track completed, and in the vain hope to discover the answer before Janis did.
P.P.S. Jimmy Johnson has a hell of a lot of script and font information in his 466 lines of HTML source code, for a website that doesn’t do anything except present a three-line maintenance message.
Sorry, Urban Variable, but I just can’t reconcile your interpretation with what I see in the comic. First of all, that just doesn’t look like a turntable. It looks like a medium sized laptop, or perhaps special purpose device.
And then, if it’s his own record, and it’s spinning, why the line about “Keep playing!”? He probably knows what he put on to play. And in any case, if it’s a physical disc located right there, he will have plenty of chance to check it, and if anything probably easier after it’s done playing.
My apologies if you meant something else, and tried to clue us in by saying “phonogram” instead of “phonograph”. But in that case it just went over my head.
In the Amazon ecosystem, they have an Echo with a screen in the kitchen that shows what is currently playing on Amazon Music. Janis just goes to the Alexa app on her phone, which shows the playlist.
Not sure about the corresponding parts of the Apple Music ecosystem.
BTW, for those not “in the know”, Cockburn’s is a Canadian folk / rock artist. His last name is pronounced Co-burn, and his biggest American song was “Wondering Where the Lions Are” from 1979 (a #22 Billboard hit). He had a couple of others that rated higher on the Billboard Alternative Airplay chart.
I’m pretty sure it’s on the radio, and he’s trying to listen and see if he recognizes the song, and she just looks it up.
@ Maggie (& U.V.) – Which radio? Comics are a visual medium, so it would seem more logical to combine the action with items that have been drawn and are visible, rather than with stuff that might be present outside of the frame. Conversely (by the principle of “Chekhov’s gun“), Johnson would not have bothered to draw the laptop, nor would he have sent Arlo running toward it, if the laptop were not a factor in the story.
I went to listen to If I Had A Rocket Launcher on YouTube.
The pre-song ad was Victor Davis Hanson.
A new record for Bad Product Placement.
Looks like a Sonos Player-1 on the shelf above the laptop. So many times I’ve fumbled through on my smartphone to get the app up and connected in time to find out who’s playing what before the song ends and the player moves on to the next one.
“Hey Google! What was that song you just played for me?”
“I’m sorry, I can’t help you.”
Yeah, on second thought I like that better – I saw the laptop as a record player, but Arlo’s hoping to get to whatever Winamp is these days before the song ends.