Has the kid never seen a DJ before? Most of the really good ones have moved onto CDs, but there are a million amateurs and semi-pros (not to mention pretty much any competitive DJ) using vinyl and turntables.
Some? Nearly all of them. It was very difficult to divide an album into four equal sections (especially if you didn’t move tracks around – which was also done).
Frampton Comes Alive:
“Do you feeeeeel, KA-CHONK…like we dooooo?”
I’m an 80’s child, born in '75, but we had a turntable. I used to listen to the Disney records, they had these little plastic inserts that made them fit. Kids now will never understand the fun of making everyone sound like chipmunks by speeding it up.
And I used to be pretty good at finding the right song. You had to set it down carefully, the rings were the songs or something, and you could find it if you were good. And yes, you couldn’t drag the needle across or you’d scratch the record.
I forgot one more thing - a brand-new record on a good record player has a sound that’s never been matched.
There’s a blank-looking space between tracks and you manually set the needle down there. After steeling yourself and taking a good look. My father always used a higher-end turntable which had no automatic arm movement, but us kids had one with a button that automatically placed the needle at the beginning of the record. You could always pick it up after that and skip around. Pop had about 7000 records at his peak but has moved a few times and winnowed it down to a few hundred, transcribing the rest to an even more obscure format, reel-to-reel tape.
Re the OP, a friend of mine had heard a song on the radio which I happened to own. I played the first side of the cassette and it ended and she said, “It wasn’t on there!” I had to explain the concept of a cassette which has two sides and must be flipped over. 
j/k she was old enough to know better but was used to CDs.
The demise of vinyl has obsoleted my favorite IQ test for dates:
I had a couple of alblums I’d transferred to cassettes, where the record had skipped/repeated while I was taping them…One line of the song would repeat maybe three or four times before I was able to bump the turntable.
I got pretty good a timing a slap on the dashboard so that it appeared that this caused the tape to stop repeating.
A couple of dates looked at me puzzled “Tapes can’t do that!” I then knew those girls were the keepers.
Double Six…of course you’re right. I was going from memory. My bad.
I remember the first time I took an 8-track tape apart. Yeah, I took everything apart. My first impression was, “Damn, it’s a wonder these things ever work.” I had one of the quadra-phonic decks in my first pickup. Great marketing, that. Pay more money for half the music.
Then cassettes came, with auto-reverse. Cool stuff.
The I got a good Sansui receiver and turntable and Bose 301’s. Thank goodness for Columbia house. They enabled me to acquire a bunch of vinyl all at once. And it sounded soooo good. I discovered that there were more than two kinds of music (Country and Western).
Oh, those were the days. I should dust off the stack of vinyl when I get home tonight.
[Nitpick]I think you mean “Groove”. There was only one groove per side on vinyl records. [/Nitpick]
Plus you needed those lint rollers to clean the record before you played it, and a little brush to clean the dust off the needle when the sound started going bad.
When I was in college I built my collection by taping everyone else’s records (reel to reel tape, 5 albums per reel.) I got quite good at being able to get the tape recorder off pause just seconds before the music would begin, minimizing the scratches of blank vinyl.
Two things about needles. One, they are good antennas. MIT dorm phones at the time were dial, obviously, but the connection made a signal that probaby is being received at distant stars today. If someone in the next room made a call while I was taping, the clicks got picked up on the needle and thus onto the tape. While I have the CD of Sgt. Peppers now, the last chord of Day in the Life still seems missing something without the click-click-click I captured while taping it.
Second, needles are sharp. When I was a kid we had a little record player. Somehow one night my brother fell out of bed, gashed his face on the needle, and had to get taken to the emergency room by my parents. I’m going by hearsay on this, since I never woke up during the whole crisis.
You may want to take that up with the people at Neumann or Scully, who made lathes with the provision to vary the number of grooves per inch when cutting a master disc.
Of course, I know what you mean.
Most radio signals would only be received by nearby stars. Sheesh, leave it to MIT students! 
I’ve got two problems with this. For one, I don’t remember needles being that sharp. I thought they were a pointy yet dull hunk of diamond. I used to run my finger tip over them.
Second, don’t the needles usually point down? In order for your story to be true, your brother would have to have fallen out of bed, onto the record player which for some reason was on the floor (Why in Og’s name was something in a boy’s room not put away?!?), and his head would have riccocheted off the platter, and bounced up to the arm, which would have been suspended a good seven or more inches from the platter, to upside-down implale its giant needle of death clear through his cheek.
Naw, doesn’t sound likely. I submit that they used it as an excuse to go out for ice cream without you, as they probably never really loved you in the first place.
It’s quite simple, really. In between each song is a narrow ring of vinyl where the groove is much less tightly spiraled, so much so that it looks smooth compared to the grooved appearance where the actual music is located. Position the needle over the appropriate “smooth” ring and pull the cue lever forward. Presto! You can easily start the record at any song you choose.
No - old MIT students. I figured 35 light years away qualified as distant. 
This being a cheapo kids player, without a cue lever, the arm was free to raise up to 90 degrees. Which meant that you could indeed drag the needle over the record, but we basically only had kids singles, which had grooves about a quarter inch thick.
How my brother managed this I don’t know, being asleep at the time, but he is quite clever. He’s no longer accident prone which is lucky since he used to skydive quite a bit, and never bounced.
BTW, my Mom always liked me best. 
And getting the needle positioned right over the space between the tracks is a skill you develop with time.
Question for someone who used to be a deejay - did the radio version of records have bigger between track spaces, or did the records get cued up in the right place and then spun up to speed?
Ah. So you’re a member of the Quarter Century Club. Don’t get me started. No wonder your parents never loved you.
I don’t suppose that by any coincidence you knew Mike Bromberg? Or Carol Navotsky?
The records were played up to the first sound, the motor stopped and the turntable rotated backward by hand to an appropriate distance for the platter to get up to speed. Usually a quater turn, although later, direct-drive turntables would start up in .1 second or less.
No. The records provided to radio stations were usually no different than the ones you’d buy in a story; they just had “Promotional Copy” stamped on the cover.
How it worked: pro turntables got up to speed in about a quarter turn. You’d place the needle in the track space, manually rotate the turntable until you heard the first sound from the track, then rotate backwards a quarter turn.
This is all bringing me back, even though we have always had a turntable. My mom wouldn’t let us touch hers so I’m afraid to touch this one because it’s my husband’s. Isn’t that kind of sad?
I did have my own when I was a kid and, yes, you could not only find tracks but, with practice, find parts of tracks by learning to read the lines in the disk. I used to like to play songs at the wrong speed sometimes.
The very bad, horrible downside of having a turntable is when your six year old discovers that it’s used for playing Daddy’s old KISS albums.