The thing with physical media that is often missed is - it never interrupts you for an OS update, you never lose content due to lapsed subscription, artists/labels can't revoke songs, theres no controller app that can be broken by updates, you don't have to worry about your speakers aging out of firmware updates.

You just put the media in and press play.

Sure having infinite streaming libraries is cool yes, but people listen to the same stuff or slowly expand listening habits. $10-30/mo for life ends up being a lot more money than just buying what you actually enjoy and listening to radio/stream like stuff to sample new.

The streamers are slop slingers now. Ironically I have found that YouTube's recommendation engine is 100x better for me than Spotify/Apple/Tidal ever were, and I don't even pay for Youtube, lol. Or sites like Discogs for more engaged music discovery.

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eterm 8 hours ago | parent [-]

> you never lose content due to lapsed subscription

You do however lose content to phyiscal damage or just misplacement.

I love CDs, but I've also lost some of my favourite CDs to damage or loss.

Yes, the quality of recommendations is generally terrible, but the equivalent in the physical media age, walking into a CD store and hearing something you love, just sadly isn't coming back.

Spotify etc are still unreasonably cheap for what they deliver, it costs the same as a couple of albums a month.

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SoftTalker 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

But another problem with online streams is that they are increasingly not the original music. More and more are remastered, autotuned, rebalanced to sound good on a phone speaker or earbuds. This can probably be done largely with AI now. A vinyl album or even a CD or local mp3 file is what it is when it was recorded, and will stay that way as long as it lasts.

	▲	Dwedit 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		To be fair, the stereo versions of The Beatles recordings badly needed remastering. Lots of things were hard-panned. They treated the original stereo mix as some novelty, and put all their focus and effort into the mono mix.

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steveBK123 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Most people outside their teenage years, unless music is their passion, are not actively engaging with the streaming services enough to consume 2 albums of new content monthly.

The old iTunes pay per song / album model with 30+ second previews is arguably a better model than where we’ve landed.

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baq 7 hours ago | parent [-]

I beg to differ. Most people I know use streaming for automated relevant recommendations. I’m listening to Tidal’s daily discovery playlist on most days and most of it is meh, but I make a note of a new piece every other day or so.

	▲	SoftTalker 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I'm not sure who is the outlier but I'm like the GP says. Was into music and stereo systems as a teen and into my 20s. Now, I just listen to whatever is on the radio in the car. Even streaming is too much hassle most of the time. I will go to YouTube music occasionally when I get the urge to listen to a specific song, but that's pretty rare.

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danaris 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This is why the happy medium is owning your own data.

You can have the CDs or not, but owning your copy of the MP3 file, which you keep on a hard drive, or on a thumb drive, or on a portable SSD (in any of these cases, with a backup somewhere!), or wherever, means that

1) you can play it any time you want, for no extra money

2) your access to it can never be revoked

3) you can keep copying it onto new physical media any time you're worried about the old one wearing out