It would appear that they were a "garment-rending disaster" at least to some, like the author of the article.

>Obviously you perceive value in the local storage that the rest of the market does not.

lots of people perceive higher quality media as having value, in fact there are markets for those people, just not the largest market which values convenience more.

> The market winning solution, of course, is to put THE entire music library, all of it, everyone's, in the cloud and get to it from any device anywhere.

Not in a free market (which is part of "libertarian ideals", or at least it's supposed to be). In a free market, there is no single "solution"--there are whatever solutions people are willing to pay more than they cost for. If you want your music in the cloud, and you pay for that, and I want my music locally, and I pay for that, that is the libertarian ideal.

Trying to own the entire market and force your "solution" on everyone, just because you happen to have enough users to be able to get away with such bullying, at least for a time, is not a free market. But that's what the tech giants are trying to do.

> Obviously you perceive value in the local storage that the rest of the market does not.

That the majority of the market does not, yes. But I don't think I'm even close to being the only person that doesn't want to depend on "the cloud" for everything I do.

And the biggest part of the money you pay the streaming platform goes to neither Soundgarden, nor the remaining Beatles, nor to those artists you discovered but to Taylor Swift[1]. This is in stark contrast to how CD economics worked.

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...

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? Everything has a cost but those records, CDs and cassettes look like a good deal from here. I still have LPs I inherited from my parents. They still play on my 20 year old turntable.

Not sure why petrochemicals and trees ie hydrocarbons are any more or less absurd than the silicon, metals, etc quarried and mined from around the world needed to store information digitally in data centers (or mobile devices).

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.

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