I think we are way past the stage of "files as an offline singular entity" thing. Most everything these days is meant to be synced, shared, collaborated on, copied, sent etc. We are in sort of a transition stage between files and "pure data" (or whatever you wanna call it).

In these days of interconnectivity something like modifying metadata or storing metadata inside a file is a deprecated concept. This is a good thing but it takes away the simplicity of files.

I have worked with MP3 files (built 2 audio players for Windows) and while it's fun, its very cumbersome as well. For example the metadata is not consistent across files. Not to mention how slow IO is. Furthermore it's not synced with the file. If another program changes a file, everything else stays behind. You can resync but that's slow.

This is a sacrifice we made for owning the music we bought. Today you pay a couple of dollars for a Spotify subscription and get access to millions of albums. Is that a good thing? It's certainly an evolution. You don't have to copy files around anymore if you want to share a song. You can just send a link. You don't have to manage metadata, sync lyrics, deal with quality etc. anymore. That's all done for you.

It's certainly convenient but it takes away the novel feeling of owning something.