The case for physical media ownership

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 bought a Kindle copy of Steven Baxter's novel Ring. One day, I decided to re-read it and downloaded it to a new device.

It had changed from the English edition to the German translation!

Amazon eventually admitted that this was some kind of glitch, but they were uninterested in fixing it. I got a refund, but there was no way for me to read the book.

It's a bit more subtle than that, I'm afraid. In many instances lately, physically owning a product no longer means that you own it: the fact that BMW tried to introduce subscriptions for heated seats, VW blocking out Graphene users from connecting their phones to their cars, Insta360 asking you to install their app to use their camera, which does not need to be connected to a cloud service to function, bambu labs trying to shutdown open source projects, the list goes on - that's manufacturers openly denying you from owning the products you paid for(and can hold).

There's another side to that as well: many people (contentiously or not) realized that when something is free, then you are the product. Now look at penai, anthropic, google, etc. Anyone that has basic GCSE level math skills can work out that their pricing does not cover their costs. Some people are in denial about it, some don't care and some truly believe that they are not the product cause they pay what is effectively a symbolic subscription. Or all three, but still, you are paying for something you don't own.

I don't come from a wealthy family and when I was a kid, all the software I used for making dumb games like flash, photoshop, etc were pirated. Same with music and movies. Eventually I switched over to Linux and open source projects. When I grew up and could finally afford those things, it only felt right to pay for a netflix subscription, spotify and whatnot. But due to the vile invasion in my personal space and the 0 guarantee that I'll have access to my favourite song the next morning, I got fed up and went back to self-hosting and pirating(to a degree). One of my best friends is a musician and I know that spotify is a big f-u to most artists since they have a winner-takes-all policy which makes me feel a lot less guilty. And frankly, if it is something I enjoy, I'll just head on over to the artist's website and buy a digital copy as a form of gratitude(even though I have often already downloaded the music): an album which I had very high hopes for dropped yesterday, I listened to it, liked it, downloaded it and bought a digital copy about an hour ago. Despite having it on my navidrome library since last night. At the end of the day, the artist will get a better compensation that way compared to what they'd get if I was listening to them on spotify, even on repeat.

So while the author has the right idea, sadly it's only part of the story.

So like large asteroids have absolute power over us?

I think we do what we want come hell or high water.

From the beginning. Ownership is intangible. It exists only because of the collective consent to laws.

The difference between ownership of a physical object and ownership of an intellectual one is a matter of conventional. It's easier to define ownership of an object that is excludable, but that's human convenience, not a physical law.