Why play a music CD? No ads, no privacy terrors, no algorithms

I know it does encoding/decoding for video at least; I don't know how its music features compare.

I used to be a serious CD holdout, but then a few things happened that changed things for me.

Storage

Look, I'm in my late 40s. I've been buying music on CD since I was about 17. I have LOTS. It's not really sustainable, so when iTunes went DRM-free, I started buying the odd thing there.

I live in a place with a proper record store, so I still buy things there, too, but mostly stuff I know I really want the best experience out of. Random music that I kinda know I'll tire of and probably never revisit, though? Definitely iTunes.

Fucking Sync.

I'm in the Apple ecosystem, because this works best for me and my family, but one thing they never really sorted before Apple Music was whole-family-uses-same-library. It was awkward and vexing, especially to the non-technical members of the household, and so (e.g.) my wife ended up just not really having music with her on her phone.

That's annoying. Plus, even for someone like me, it was annoying that if I bought a CD (or a vinyl record with a download code), getting that music on my phone was a hassle.

So when Apple Music happened, I eventually signed up, and holy cow I haven't really looked back.

What's great about it for my wife is that she never has to bother plugging her phone into a computer to get music at all. She can just add stuff on the fly, from Apple Music. Maybe it's stuff we own already, but that wasn't on the phone yet. Maybe it's new stuff she wants. Doesn't matter; still easy.

We still buy records and CDs from our local shop, too -- mostly the same algorithm, between "I want this forever" and "this is probably transient" -- but overall we're both listening to MORE music than we did before. I mean, think about it: I'm paying Apple basically the cost of a CD per month for our family account, but the world is literally our oyster. MANY times since I signed up I've found myself reading a review of some album somewhere, and wanted to hear it. Before, I'd have to make a note to go find it online somewhere, or find a Youtube clip, or whatever. Now I can just have it, almost immediately, on my preferred device and through good headphones. It's pretty great.

Now, I'm really only willing to do this because the vendor is Apple, and I trust them with my listening habit data. I wouldn't trust an ad-driven provider AT ALL, which is why I never signed up for Pandora or Spotify or whatever. But with Apple, all this is easy, and I'm not concerned about the privacy implications.

I still have a shitload of CDs and vinyl, though. It used to be that "hey, pick a record" was a fun party game, because so few folks have big record collections. Now CD has picked up some of that novelty, too, and people enjoy browsing through the CD stacks when we entertain. But that's all a special corner case. ;)

It's amazing to me that people still think iTunes music has DRM.

I rip my CDs, store them on my NAS and then burn them back on a CD for playing in my car. The original stays in a closet in case my NAS ever dies and the burnt copy in my car lives as long as it lives, given the hot Florida sun.

>The issue even with a DRM-free local iTunes library is: how are people going to keep that over 30 years?

Parts of my MP3 library are 20 years old. Why do you think keeping them spinning a few more decades will be any harder?

>But for a local iTunes library you need IT admin skills to manage it, to back it up, to transfer it from one machine to the next, perhaps to understand that you can access the music without iTunes, etc. The vast majority of the public don't know how to do that.

Honestly, I think that's why streaming is taking over. Apple's approach to solving the sync problem was to rethink the whole paradigm, and so we got Apple Music instead of smarter iPhone/iPod sync. Sure, they get service revenue in the bargain, but to me it seems like an easy play.