[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by The Soup Nazi

Thank you.

We're gonna die.

yeah

and i'm one of the murderers. just confessing my crime.

i don't do it on purpose, but my seminomadic lifestyle makes me averse to gathering possessions.

when i was younger i didn't have money to buy a lot of records. we traded cassettes, which tended to die frequently. also there was radio and some radio was good (not anymore).

but then i had to go and left my records behind. who has them now? no idea.

years passed, cds happened, pain in the ass boxes, limiting. but then we had napster! and napster had it all. just crap quality. but you could listen to anything you could think of. and piracy exploded because above all it seems that people want access.

now i get more music than i can shake a stick at, all legal, in high res lossless quality, some of it now remixed for dolby atmos even, playing out of a pocket thing. and a dedicated classical music app. no shit.

i... really like having access. i like paying for it. i like that i can even control the thing from my wrist. i'm a horrible man, i know, buying access and convenience like a mindless drone. i jack it into the car too and vroom. road trip.

but i really like convenience snd don't want to have to carry around and manage possessions.

even my books, my original true passion since age... ooof.., 3, no joke, i used to travel with suitcases filled eith books, i used to send boxes on cargo ships, i used to mail them on m bags at library rates.

now...? i don't care to collect as "objects" anymore, and i buy kindle versions of stuff i already own so that i can read them. because yeah, i can take them all with me anywhere on a tablet. which has its own light.

"sad," i guess, but that is my life today. i wouldn't want to be stuck where my books and records and "cds" (haha cds) live today (stored, in crates, on shelves, in forgotten rooms).

and if i don't want physical clutter--why would i want to buy files? i have files that are 100% forgotten on some dead hard drive. i would gladly pay NOT to have files. files need storage. management. updating/transcoding, fucking headache, i don't have a secretary or a clerical department. i'll pay someone to do it.

i love books, but i have always loved libraries the best. they keep more books than i can ever own.

so i also prefer musical libraries too. and i guess most other people do too ("streaming is the model" sez greg. or something to that effect.)

i don't mind paying for a library subscription. they do all the filing.

so for musicians i think it's self-defeating to look for solutions in "what was." it used to be this way, it used to be that way... sure, it was, but that is not where we are now. i would love to have jazz 90 back in udc but that was 3 lifetimes ago. the thing is now a cspan (blech, but it fits the town).

anyway, we're now in the land of total access, and with total access come massive network effects. deerhoof has to work hard to eke out a working class living, while taylor swift is like, officislly a billionaire or something (can't be avoided. she gets mentioned like 10x a day on bloomberg. they have something called "the taylor swift effect" on the economy. i shit you not. like metalocalypse but lame)

oh, and what ever happened to tidal? damn... that was a kind of well-funded co-op, i think. artist-owners and what not.

anyway, i have no solutions. sorry. just trying to lay out the problem as it is. as a contributor i mean.