Hacker News Reader

Comment by Steuard | Hacker News Reader

The part that stuck out to me was when the author talked about her desire to have a long-term archive of her favorite music, but wasn't willing to "wait for 2 days for a CD to ship". I can understand not wanting to deal with CDs or not wanting to spend money on less-favorite songs on the album, but focusing on the delay just doesn't click for me.

View on HN

If the only way you could get to Hacker News was over a dial-up connection, would you switch to dial-up or would you just go to a different site that loads a broadband speed?

Waiting two days to then have to deal with the unpleasant experience of getting a physical CD sucks. Wait two days, then rip the CD, then move the file to your phone... or just find other music you like that can be immediately downloaded. I love music but there are very few individual songs I would do that for.

I've done that with my entire music collection. I have only ever bought one MP3 in my entire life. The rest of it is ripped from the CDs that I have bought. If the artist has gone to the effort of recording, mixing, mastering and designing sleeve notes and documenting who took part in the process, then that's really something worth buying.

If we only consider music to be as valuable as background white noise, then downloading it without the associated archive of data is probably worth it. But I think the entire process is worth more, which is why I'll buy it and wait the "forever" of 2 days for a CD to arrive.

I can't believe people consider 2 days for postage for a CD to be a long time. Is this a generation of "I want it NOW NOW NOW NOW" that I am surrounded with?

You really haven't noticed before now?

Perhaps, but I ignore it for long enough until it rears its head again and I feel disappointed, like now...

It's a generation with a deeply internalized notion of opportunity cost. That and given most people care primarily about the actual music the ratio in effort to ship/rip a cd versus download a torrent is enormous.

I'll usually buy CDs at shows (since I assume more money goes to the artist), or when an artist just doesn't sell digital copies (e.g., Ladybaby).

But okay, I look at the pretty artwork once, I wonder at what exactly a producer does, and then I never, ever look at that stuff again. I buy the CD for mostly the music, which I consume via my ears.

I've literally got a stack of CDs that I purchased to get artists' music, and only keep them around for sentimental purposes. If the cats eat them all tomorrow, I'd be vaguely bummed out, but I honestly don't think they've even seen a CD laser since I ripped them the first time.

If it's an album worth having, yes. But those are rare. Why pay $20 and wait two days to rip a single song that you want to listen to?

There are also people who thought the telephone would never take off because telegrams were a richer experience.

It’s two days if you live in the US. I don’t, so the CD will have to travel for weeks to finally get stuck at the customs in the airport—and CDs are much more fragile than MP3s or FLACs. Moreover, I don‘t have a single device to put this CD into.

Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it.

Sure, but the author was talking about being worried about long-term access to her favorite songs. I think she said that soundcloud still has most or all of them right now: the next two days are presumably not the big concern here. If she wanted a constant stream of curated but non-specific new material, I agree that that would be a different issue.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com