The end of physical media is neigh

I'm thinking with the age of most of the responders here, that the end of physical media will not be much of an issue...especially with LP and CD sales not only stabilizing but actually growing slightly in 2024...

Another Carrington event will give this discussion a whole new complexion.

jsalerno277

@cleeds “blissfully simple” was @devinplombier  post, not mine.

Oops! You're correct of course and I'm sorry, @jsalerno277. That's exactly the type of mistake I try to avoid here!

A conversation we should be having as a society is the nature of ownership in a changing world. For decades, 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. 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.

@devinplombier You absolutely do have control over it. If you buy a song from, say, Qobuz you can download it to your computer, NAS, etc. and it’s yours and nobody can take it away from you. Moreover, you can just buy the songs you want and aren’t forced to buy the whole CD, which is way more cost effective and efficient. It’s a wonderful new world.

@ararem

"The history of hominids making music goes back well more than 100K years; physical media has only existed for the last 147 of them"

That’s a hell of a gap from, say, Beethoven’s death in 1827. So how do we know what Beethoven wrote? Simple, we have the physical media he wrote his music on, all those years ago.

I know that’s not the whole story. The didgeridoo is at least 1,000 years old and is capable of such a variety of sounds, I cannot imagine how music for it can be written as a score. It is played using "circular breathing" where the mouth breathes out while the nose breathes in, The drone effect is modulated by the player "talking", which can sound percussive. For real percussion, it can be beaten with sticks! Magical