When you think of the countless number of more useful things you can do with a piece of plastic than make a record out of it, I feel the least we can do is say something worthwhile on it.
Just think of how many pieces of plastic there are in your town or city holding music. Then think of how many towns and cities around the world are the same. Millions upon millions of pieces of plastic just for music than can be served via digital means now but are kept on plastic because of nostalgia and a feeling of connection to the analog.
Those digital alternatives are provided by services that broadly reserve the right to pull your access to that media at any time. That doesn’t even get into how many of these services are owned by large corporations who take the money that you the consumer give them for access to the media that they control and contribute it towards political campaigns or environmentally damaging ventures far worse than manufacturing a CD and wrapping it in a layer of plastic.
And if you’re wary of either choice knowing that, there’s always piracy, which naturally has been criminalized.
Bandcamp (and its plethora of alternatives) allow people to purchase digital files and do what they wish with them. Such as load them onto their phone, an mp3 player of some kind (my 14 year old iPod classic is still going strong!), or onto a server hosting something like Navidrome or Jellyfin.
Just because Spotify, Apple Music, etc have the biggest advertising budget doesn’t mean they’re the only alternative.
Content you purchase in a Transaction cannot be guaranteed to be available to you perpetually. For example, if we receive a notification of claimed infringement from a copyright owner or its agent with respect to specific Content, then we may be required by law to remove that Content from the Service and not make it available for future sale and we may also have to deny continued access to anyone who previously purchased such Content. This means that you may lose access to purchased Content previously available to you through the Service.
If we are required by law to deny access through the Service to previously purchased Content, including by removing access to Content from a user’s personal collection through any mobile application, then Company will not provide the user who purchased that Content with a refund, except as required by applicable law. Users bear all risk from the denial of access to any Content purchased through the Service.
Company may terminate your access to all or any part of the Service at any time, with or without cause, with or without notice, effective immediately, which may result in the forfeiture and destruction of all information associated with your membership, including, without limitation, any access to any Music you may have purchased through the Service.
Downloading that music to your devices is all well and good until you experience a RAID array failure. Or your SD card gets corrupted. Or your old phone decides it doesn’t want to turn on anymore. Local digital storage is a limited, degrading resource. The device you put your file on is something you anticipate becoming eWaste that will be thrown away someday, and in anticipation of that happening we generally introduce redundancy that means more stuff that will eventually get thrown away.
I say this as someone who has his own Jellyfin NAS setup and who has both lost physical media in natural disasters and digital data to simple memory failure. None of these systems are infallible and physical media has value beyond simple nostalgia factor or novelty.
https://youtu.be/iOI_NmAf0Go
Just think of how many pieces of plastic there are in your town or city holding music. Then think of how many towns and cities around the world are the same. Millions upon millions of pieces of plastic just for music than can be served via digital means now but are kept on plastic because of nostalgia and a feeling of connection to the analog.
Those digital alternatives are provided by services that broadly reserve the right to pull your access to that media at any time. That doesn’t even get into how many of these services are owned by large corporations who take the money that you the consumer give them for access to the media that they control and contribute it towards political campaigns or environmentally damaging ventures far worse than manufacturing a CD and wrapping it in a layer of plastic.
And if you’re wary of either choice knowing that, there’s always piracy, which naturally has been criminalized.
Those services aren’t the only option.
Bandcamp (and its plethora of alternatives) allow people to purchase digital files and do what they wish with them. Such as load them onto their phone, an mp3 player of some kind (my 14 year old iPod classic is still going strong!), or onto a server hosting something like Navidrome or Jellyfin.
Just because Spotify, Apple Music, etc have the biggest advertising budget doesn’t mean they’re the only alternative.
Bandcamp is one of those services.
Downloading that music to your devices is all well and good until you experience a RAID array failure. Or your SD card gets corrupted. Or your old phone decides it doesn’t want to turn on anymore. Local digital storage is a limited, degrading resource. The device you put your file on is something you anticipate becoming eWaste that will be thrown away someday, and in anticipation of that happening we generally introduce redundancy that means more stuff that will eventually get thrown away.
I say this as someone who has his own Jellyfin NAS setup and who has both lost physical media in natural disasters and digital data to simple memory failure. None of these systems are infallible and physical media has value beyond simple nostalgia factor or novelty.