The end of physical media is neigh

Do you have an opinion on machine learning and AI replacing musicians and actors in the generation of new content? … and its effect on culture. 

Well AI is here and will only increase in its presence.  But it’s a mistake to think it will become an either/or scenario.  AI may generate some interesting music, but humans will always continue to make incredible music.  A loose comparison may be drum machines — they are certainly capable of laying down good drum tracks but have in no way supplanted the human drummer.  The computer-generated stuff only goes so far. 

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.

@agwca  If you’re considering adding streaming my strong advice is to just do it.  I too went into it kinda reluctantly about five years ago and my only regret is that I didn’t do it much sooner.  The freedom to explore worlds of new music, much of it in hi res BTW, has increased my enjoyment of music listening more than anything else in my lifetime by a large margin.  I’ve never had so much enjoyment as an audiophile.  Discovering incredible new music is so much more interesting and rewarding than just playing the same stuff over and over.  That’s fun as far as it goes, but it doesn’t compare in the least to finding tons of awesome new music, and I hardly ever spin a CD anymore.  If you’re on the fence, jump!  Just my $0.02 FWIW.

Yes. A paid download can be stored on your HD and copied, moved, and backed up however you wish. You own the file.

@cleeds  Thanks.  That’s what I would’ve thought but wasn’t sure.  It makes total sense. 

Not surprising Blu-ray is going away.  With CDs there will maybe be enough die hard audiophiles to keep the market afloat because they think it sounds better.  My take is that streaming can sound as good or better than CDs (plus you get hi res in streaming), but it takes a lot more effort to optimize versus just buying a high quality transport and DAC and being done.  I get it.  But with movies, does anyone really care that much if streaming movies isn’t quite as good as Blu-ray?  I’d say 95% of the population couldn’t give a crap and the convenience of streaming overwhelms any quality differences.  It’s just not as important when it comes to movies, hence the demise of Blu-ray.  
 

I will say a major takeaway from this that I did not know was that I always assumed if you bought/downloaded music you owned it but apparently you do not and stuff you bought can still be yanked from you.  That’s just flat-out wrong and scary.  You don’t own the music but rather just the right to play the music.  That was new for me and quite concerning.  It’s a brave/scary new world.  I’m not up on downloading but is it possible to ultimately download the music to a server?  I’d think then you’d have it forever but not sure how that works.  Like, if you buy something from Qobuz, can you ultimately download it to your own personal server?  I’m admittedly ignorant in these things.  Still scary.