Why Music Ownership Matters

This is an excellent article written by Ted Gioia.
I think he manages to cover a broad spectrum of information that comes to a conclusion that can't be avoided by the realist.

Why Music Ownership Matters

This is not a streaming vs physical media thing, nor is it a record vs cd thing, so we shouldn't really need to go down those rabbit trails.

This is about the value of owning something, for now, and for future generations. I found it very interesting, and well balanced. I just thought that perhaps some others may as well.
It isn't really that long, but I think it requires reading in full, to get the whole context.

 

This is a streaming vs physical media thing.

 

No, it isn't. It is a preservation of music for the generations thing, if you actually read it.

 

Interesting perspective and I can’t say I disagree. I will say on my behalf I’m doing more than my share towards keeping the ownership aspect going. Maybe I should have my wife read this too.

 

i have thousands of lps. hundreds of cds, cassettes, and 8 tracks. dozens of guitars. multiple recievers, turntables, tape decks, cd player, etc.

and no children. all this stuff will end up in someone else's hands eventually. i'm just a caretaker.

 

Same.
I don't know how many miles I have left on the clock, but I hope it all goes into the hands of somebody who cares, somewhere down the line.

 

it kind of blows my mind sometimes when i crack open a new record and hold it in my hands. where will that thing be in 50 years??

 

I assume my wall full of CDs will wind up where 99% of all cylinders and 78s wound up.

 

It is hard to escape the fact that a great number of all our collections will become landfill ... and that would be tragic.
I am insane enough to try and keep my eyes open for someone who would actually care about my collection, in order to pass it on to them, and perhaps even care enough that when they also reach a certain age, will do the same

 

It really is. You just want to believe otherwise. I'm not suggesting that there isn't merit to the article. But you're ignoring that it is about the implications of streaming.

 

Wow. Ted Gioia. When I was in college, we had two primary music reviewers for the school paper. I did the rock stuff, and Ted did the jazz stuff...

 

A very thought-provoking article that raises several very interesting and important points. Unfortunately, as more music is made, more of is going permanently out-of-print. That’s never a good thing.

 

I really do wish there was some kind of unified effort to preserve recorded music history digitally. Just a massive server and a second backup location, completely separate from the labels, where recordings could be properly archived. But of course the labels would never go for this, even after what happened at Universal. But this would be much, much more practical than the current haphazard systems of private collectors with the money and space to have massive collections.

 

I just had this conversation with my 16 year old daughter. I told her they’re all documented in discogs and I’m going to put little stickers on the ones worth $$$ so they don’t end being tossed to goodwill.

 

It's a bit presumptuous of current generations to suggest what future generations ought to value, and how they ought to. Understandable, but presumptuous.

 

It is about the implications of moving to only streaming.
I don't see that as being anti-streaming.

I use streaming for music discovery. I believe streaming has a place in the music world. I just don't think it should become the music world

 

A starting point for such a project would be all the music that is in the public domain, IMO.

 

That's very cool.

 

Spoiler

 

With some thought on the best and safest ways to do it, that is certainly a very solid idea

 

I understand that perspective, but really, shouldn't we document everything?
In some way or another, if people care about the world we live in, wouldn't we document everything, so that all the information is available for those who would care to sift through the cinders of our reality?
I don't even think that should just be music really

 

In an ideal world, I suppose. 'Enough' will survive though, in any case (everything isn't everything!). Also: I think streaming throws up problems as a means of consumption, but it isn't anti-documentation.

 

Google Books set the template, for, at minimum, digitizing out-of-print and public domain works. But ...

It was a crazy idea: Take the bulk of the world’s books, scan them, and create a monumental digital library for all to access. That’s what Google dreamed of doing when it embarked on its ambitious book-digitizing project in 2002. It got part of the way there, digitizing at least 25 million books from major university libraries.

But the promised library of everything hasn’t come into being. An epic legal battle between authors and publishers and the internet giant over alleged copyright violations dragged on for years. A settlement that would have created a Book Rights Registry and made it possible to access the Google Books corpus through public-library terminals ultimately died, rejected by a federal judge in 2011. And though the same judge ultimately dismissed the case in 2013, handing Google a victory that allowed it to keep on scanning, the dream of easy and full access to all those works remains just that.

What Happened to Google's Effort to Scan Millions of University Library Books? | EdSurge News

 

Well, I don't know what of our culture is going to survive, or if we survive. If you look at the Greek plays, they're really good. And there's just a handful of them. Well, how good would they be if there were 2,500 of them? But that's the future looking back at us. Anything you can think of, there's going to be millions of them. Just the sheer number of things will devalue them. I don't care whether it's art, literature, poetry or drama, whatever. The sheer volume of it will wash it out. I mean, if you had thousands of Greek plays to read, would they be that good? I don't think so.

- Cormac McCarthy, 2009

 

You're a real ray of sunshine lol