The ability to browse music is very powerful.
I lost my 1 Soundgarden CD 20 years ago. Now I can listen to all their albums.
You can do the entire Beatles catalogue <- this is a different form of listening.
Discover artists I would never have otherwise heard of.
It has it's downsides, but I dont think CD was 'better'.
We just have an imperfect situation.
As someone who spent a lot of his youth carefully avoiding big label acts and trying to support small artists, this is what bothers me the most: there is no way to do that anymore if you use streaming.
[1] https://mertbulan.com/2025/08/10/why-paying-for-spotify-most...
One day, someone will have to face the reckoning of our preferences vs our values.
May I be the one with the courage to meet it; failing which, not be standing around when the bill is due.
The motto of our era.
https://www.cnet.com/culture/blu-ray-victory-means-royalties...
https://blu-raydisc.info/flla-faq.php
> Instead of what - vast data centres full of electronics, consuming huge quantities of electricity, controlled by techno-feudalistic megacorps who keep almost all of the money and supply a pittance to the artists?
So what's your alternative, stocking every single video store in the country with plastic discs with DRMs transported by diesel trucks? Do you seriously think the material cost of manufacturing and transporting a disc is less than what it takes to send its contents over the internet?
I use streaming services. I like the flexibility and ubiquity of access. But my favourite music I still buy on cd or vinyl. Why? Because it means I’m not subject to the whims of a megacorp removing access and it means more goes to the artist. I’ve been buying music for 40 years and still listen to some of stuff I bought then. I hope to live long enough to do the same for the music I buy now.
It seems trivial to see that storing all the music in 1 or more DCs for the entire world is more efficient than a whole industry to create and redistribute plastics and specialized devices to play this plastic.
Eh, not really, it costs it's own storage and care. This is not free even if you have discounted in to the rest of the cost of your life. Not destroying LPs for example is a good bit of work.
With music itself, it's electronic storage is insanely cheap. One middleling server could easily contain just about the entirety of all mankinds works. Parallel distribution really is the bigger factor, and I guess that costs almost nothing itself. Marketing and software around marketing likely is the majority of the cost here.
Trying to compare a cellphone to a record is just not a really workable thing. People are going to have the cellphone anyway. The fact it is a media player is a welcome bonus.
Storing data of any kind in plastic as opposed to silicon metal seems like a meaningless distinction that only comes about from imagining that there is some disembodied, ethereal and platonic notion of digital “data” which is decoupled from any physical substrate. everything is always materialized and mediated through some complex, and probably vaguely arcane, geologically extractive process in some way.
About the only worse case of motivated reasoning I have seen are from NIMBYs straining their brains to claim how any new development would be catastrophic. One notable example being a claim that adding trains would bring in more criminals to the neighborhood and lead to more burglaries.