The end of physical media is neigh

With over ten million albums...it’s not a very restrictive list. Also, Qobuz has over half a million high resolution albums. It is very seldom that I find an album not available.

More importantly, when you have access to all that music your focus changes over time to listen to new music instead of the same old stuff. The re-listening to the same stuff had a lot to do with the required investment to have it in your library. Now the entire world of music is available to you. I don’t relisten to old stuff very often any more. The sound quality of my digital rig equaled my analog rig about four or five years ago. My listening habits started to change a little at first and after a couple years changed rapidly leaving old stuff to collect dust most of the time.

jsalerno277

it was blissfully simple: you purchased a LP or a CD, you owned it, you could play the music on it at will, sell it, give it, whatever. In reality, when we paid $14.95 for a CD that cost less than $1 to manufacture, the value was always in the music, not in the physical support.

It is still "blissfully simple." Nothing has changed.

With streaming, we pay for music untethered from any physical support. That's fine, but we no longer have full control over the music we paid for. Conceivably, a copyright owner could win a lawsuit and have music you own ordered removed from your library by a court.

A copyright owner can no more have a court order that you return "his" CDs or LPs than he can have the court order that you return audio files that you have purchased.

It is still "blissfully simple." Nothing has changed. Of course, if you never purchase files and only stream them, then you get what you pay for and can lose access at any time.

@cleeds “blissfully simple” was @devinplombier  post, not mine.  However, I agree with both of you in part.  The beauty is in the music, regardless of format.  Nothing has changed with regard to the legal right to play the music.  The business model changed. Now, the streaming services pay royalties to the owner of the copyright and you pay the services for the right to play the music at any time on their platform rather than the publisher/manufacturer of physical media paying the royalties and you buying the physical media.  There is no increased chance of the copyright owner preventing you to play the music, unless the service defaults on payment or the contract expires without agreement on a new contract.  What has changed is it is much more convenient to stream with equivalent, or in my case , improved SQ and an improved process for management of your music.  

The history of hominids making music goes back well more than 100K years; physical media has only existed for the last 147 of them. I think we're way too close to have any perspective as to whether physical media (containing recorded music) is a great ("permanent") advancement of our species or perhaps an anomalistic blip on the arc of human existence. I'd suggest one not get too attached to any form of physical media... it, too, will pass.

Thanks for your generous kindness without fail...

I did not have the icon Groucho Marx anymore alas!