Comment by simianwords | Hacker News Reader

Comment by simianwords | Hacker News Reader

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I don't buy the strange fascination with owning physical things.

The other side of this is something no one speaks about: Spotify, youtube made it possible for me to listen to _any_ music from anywhere. This kind of profound open access to art should not just be dismissed. The concerns about price increase are laughable because without spotify I wouldn't be exposed to this music in the first place.

I think the obsession with owning it physically is because of many reasons

1. a sense of identity forms when the access to own things has barrier - a whole niche/hobby forms with owning vinyl that is separate from the art itself

2. there is a sense of loss of agency when the art you like is taken away from you - this unpredictability is one of the few reasons I agree with the article

3. subscription services allow normies access to all the same art that you might have had access and dilutes your own identity

4. owning tangible things is just nicer - there's no better way to put it

Overall there's a tradeoff that subscription services give vs what they take away. I'm not very obsessed with art enough that I need to purchase them physically. Personally, youtube is all I need.

I'm going to take a safe bet and guess that you are quite young.

If you grew up in any past era where owning a physical 'thing' was the default, you naturally feel the inherent lack of ownership in a digital version of that same thing.

If you grow up in a time of mega platforms that can give you almost all of a certain media type for a subscription fee, the idea of lining up at midnight to pay 3x that fee for one plastic disc from one artist/publisher must sound insane and suboptimal.

It was a good time though.

Would you be able to explain why you liked owning things that isn't already explained by my points 1) 2) 3) 4)?

I'm guessing its just a feral fascination of owning a physical thing rather than an abstract thing which was my last point. But I think it is that but with a combination of limited supply - owning something even physical, if it is abundant, defeats the purpose.

>>> "owning tangible things is just nicer - there's no better way to put it

> Would you be able to explain why you liked owning things that isn't already explained by my points 1) 2) 3) 4)?

Your point 4 may have covered everything, but it didn't actually explain anything. So it's a bit unfair to be asking jgorn to explain, because you didn't actually explain either.

I would guess its a bit unfair to call me young and then just repeat what I said instead of adding anything novel to the discussion

Are you young? If so, why would it be unfair to state that fact?

What’s unfair about asking what they are adding beyond what I already said? To the extent that it adds to discussion, they added something that is not relevant (my supposed age) and just repeated the points I made anyway.

I subscribe to Spotify. I've got a whole galaxy of music available to me just about anywhere I go. It's very convenient and I use it all the time.

But there's music that Spotify doesn't work with. Music that I'd like to listen to, and that I used to own on CD. I've also got stuff in my Spotify favorites list that I have listened to on Spotify in the past, but which is greyed out today.

To pick something specific: Spotify won't play Front 242's album 06:21:03:11 Up Evil. It's present[0], but it won't play.

(I'm not even a tiny bit interested in hearing some rando's rip of that album on YouTube. I like that album because of the way the noises tickle my earbones, and that's exactly the kind of thing that gets lost with layers of lossy compression.)

[0]: https://open.spotify.com/album/1moLnvmMDvUQa1Dp0loJDf

No. 2 is enough though surely, I've had multiple incidences now where a series we've been watching on a streaming platform has disappeared without warning, running my own little media server alleviates that entirely.

> youtube made it possible for me to listen to _any_ music from anywhere

A spectacular number of publishers region-block all their music videos on YouTube for copyright reasons

With Qobuz (lossless music streaming), you can both pay a subscription and buy individual songs, without DRM. You then own those, supposedly forever (at least good luck getting my songs out of my backups, or preventing my airgapped/offline computers from sending them to my stereo amp).

I think it's a good middle ground: you pay a subscription, artists at least get a little something (the biggest issue for artists is the unlimited amount of fully AI-generate slop music), and you get to have actual DRM-free files.

Ripping physical music CDs to bit-perfect FLAC files --and automatically verifying with online databases of other people's rips that your rip is instead bit-perfect-- is kinda a big thing in the audiophile world too.

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