The end of physical media is neigh

I can’t deny the convenience of streaming. The problem I have is that we are at the mercy of whatever the streaming companies want to have in their library at the time, which is not a cultural or artistic decision, it’s based on negotiations which have nothing to do with anything but money.

And that’s fine, streaming companies have a right to optimize their offerings. My concern is rather, being able to share beloved movies with friends and younger generations when the powers that be have decided they are not lucrative or no longer available in your market region.

Related, but a tangent, is the way AI is taking over our listening.

Driving in my car it is impossible to ask for U2. Google keeps hearing it as Youtube and damned if I can specify "Play the irish band U2"

Alexa for instance can’t hear "Halie Loren" but plays some random artist with a name that sounds like Lauren.

And the number of times I wanted to hear a specific song from a specific artist and couldn't is often. 

Could the world's first trillionaire (or lower) just buy up all the rights to music and hold them, preventing streaming from continuing as it is? Doubt it would happen, but it might be theoretically possible. 

A total absence of physical media is concerning to me. 

I dont miss physical format for music at all...

I use digital lossless files...

I could not keep a house for 10,000 albums.

Nor for 10,000 books...

Now a simple hard disk (double for security) contain all ...

The only thing i miss is paper books...

You cannot study very specialized books or deep one on screen... I do it because i do not have the choice...

Reading on screen is like typing on a keyboard, catastrophic for memory and understanding when you are young...I am old then it is less a problem even if i can notice it...

Writing cursive is fundamental neurological learning when young...

Reading a difficult book writing in it or underlining sentences or going back and ahead at will is fundamental for memory dynamics.

For music digital is paradise for my budget and my living space...

Not surprising Blu-ray is going away.  With CDs there will maybe be enough die hard audiophiles to keep the market afloat because they think it sounds better.  My take is that streaming can sound as good or better than CDs (plus you get hi res in streaming), but it takes a lot more effort to optimize versus just buying a high quality transport and DAC and being done.  I get it.  But with movies, does anyone really care that much if streaming movies isn’t quite as good as Blu-ray?  I’d say 95% of the population couldn’t give a crap and the convenience of streaming overwhelms any quality differences.  It’s just not as important when it comes to movies, hence the demise of Blu-ray.  
 

I will say a major takeaway from this that I did not know was that I always assumed if you bought/downloaded music you owned it but apparently you do not and stuff you bought can still be yanked from you.  That’s just flat-out wrong and scary.  You don’t own the music but rather just the right to play the music.  That was new for me and quite concerning.  It’s a brave/scary new world.  I’m not up on downloading but is it possible to ultimately download the music to a server?  I’d think then you’d have it forever but not sure how that works.  Like, if you buy something from Qobuz, can you ultimately download it to your own personal server?  I’m admittedly ignorant in these things.  Still scary.