The end of physical media is neigh

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

Why invoking the sun God when a simple dwarf spirit as Apophis could be enough ?

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

I own 30 albums of didgeridoo...

The sound may be haunting indeed and rooted us through our listening body through the earth core...In a way which even the Wagner tuba is not able to because the circular breathing make it more an event of Nature than a discontinuous playing score with an instrument...

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

My point was about the nature of ownership in a digitally controlled world. Say your $80,000 Tesla had an overnight update. When you wake up in the morning, your car is not quite the same car you parked the night before. Yes, updates are usually improvements, so no worries, owners are happy.

Yet you can imagine a Tesla determining that its driver is excessively spirited, so it engages valet mode and automatically throttles speed to the posted limit? For a week? A month? It certainly has all the tech onboard to do just that.

What if, say, you ran a traffic light and your car reported you to the authorities (in addition to limiting your speed to 25 mph and restricting your sound system to NPR)?

What if authorities required Tesla to report you?

After all, it would improve public safety.

After after all, it is your car, as evidenced by the fact that you paid $80,000 for it.

That’s a ways from digital music files to be sure, but the question of the meaning of ownership runs through both.

I understand no one can reach into the NAS in your home office and delete files, at least not practically. On the other hand, local storage is being supplanted by cloud storage, where your music files are totally within reach. Glad I said "conceivably" though :)

Having said that, It is a wonderful new world, no doubt! I totally agree there