For these reasons (at least in part) I am still buying plastic discs. Another factor is ownership rights. I know as long as I have that plastic I can burn a new file if it gets lost.
IF you still have the plastic. And IF it's still in readable condition. And IF you've hung on to a device that's able to read it and make rips.
Or, IF you were sure to make a good backup rip when you first got it. And IF that backup drive still works when you power it up. And IF it's in the right file format, or IF you have the time and patience to convert it.
(Most people under 30 don't own
anything that can read circular media, today. The default configuration for all computer configurations has been sans optical drive for a number of years now. Even for those extremely rare software products where some sort of physical media form is available, that medium is a USB key.)
WIth online subscription models (at least certain models) a business restructuring could make any "purchased" content disappear.
There's an
extent to which that's true, yes... but there's also an extent to which it's
always been true, and us old-timers are merely romanticizing our notion of "ownership" based on possession of a physical copy. As if that somehow
conveys something meaningful. As if "possession is 9/10 of the law" is anything other than a wildly inaccurate legal cliche with no actual validity.
I bought a
lot of plastic circles throughout my life, both in physical music stores and via mail-order. (Or non-order. By the time I started college in the early 1990s I'd already amassed a largely BMG- and/or Columbia House-fueled CD collection numbering in the hundreds of discs, and it only went up from there.)
I've also, over the course of my life, dealt with greater than usual issues of housing instability, impermanence, necessary sacrifices, and etc. that all added up to most of that collection being lost to me, one way or another. Of all the physical-media music I previously "owned", the number of those releases I actually have access to is maybe a couple dozen, max.
I won't pretend that my situation is typical at all or applies to everyone, but part of my point is that the "ownership" we imagine a physical copy conveys upon us can, in its own way, be just as fragile as digtal "ownership", or it at least imposes upon us the responsibility and the burden of having to maintain that ownership, a factor that's rarely taken into account.
My
other point, and this one's the real kicker for me, is not my "I've lost access to nearly all of the physical media I purchased" tale, but rather one of the very few exceptions that I
do still have access to: Bloodhound Gang -
One Fierce Beer Coaster.
Why that album, specifically? Am I that much of a Bloodhound Gang superfan, that I've jealously clung to that particular CD over all others?
Not even remotely. In fact, I
DON'T still have that CD anymore. It's lost somewhere in the world with all of the others.
But that album WAS the first CD I ever ordered from Amazon, back in the early days when they were still primarily a bookstore. I happened to throw the CD in when I placed a textbook order one semester. (Late-1990s Amazon's standard carton filler was free box(es) of Cracker Jacks, which probably influenced my decision to buy books from them more than I care to admit.)
One afternoon a few years ago, long after the physical CD had disappeared from my life forever, an email notification showed up from Amazon. It seems
One Fierce Beer Coaster had been added to the Amazon Music catalog, and my physical purchase from 20 years prior entitled me to a digital copy as well. So, of all the CDs I've owned and lost, that one album alone I can still play anytime the mood strikes me just by calling it up in Amazon's service.
By all means, buy the beer coasters if it gives you peace of mind. I mean, heck, even my story hinges on
previous possession of the album in actual-CD form. Plus, somebody's gotta keep the distribution model alive. (Both of the physical disc medium, and more generally the
record album itself as a release format. Album sales are hurting, BAD, now that everyone just buys individual songs. The entire notion that an album is the standard unit size for a music artist's releases has been circling the drain for several years now.)
But even if you do buy the discs, make a digital copy, and then make a copy of that digital copy for backup. And back it up into the cloud, to keep that copy safe from the myriad disasters that can befall physical data storage of any kind. (The cloud, it's often been observed,
absolutely does just mean storing your data on someone else's drives. As anyone who's ever suffered a catastrophic hard drive failure can probably appreciate, that's actually one of the
best things about it!)
