Forget spaceships; I just want my music

Yup. Sound right.

The time spent re-ripping my CD collection to FLAC, my DVD collection to MKV, etc, has been well spent. I can rapidly enough transcode from that to "Whatever I happen to need for where I'm listening to it," and our vehicles have quite the range of local music and audiobook content for road trips that doesn't rely on streaming anything.

You can get CDs for (usually) very little on eBay, same for DVDs, and I don't have to worry about the pissing matches between a corporate conglomerate that views me as "a wallet with eyeballs" and another one that views me as "eyeballs with a wallet" getting in the way.

Meanwhile, vinyl sales continue to skyrocket, and more and more people are interested in records, growing collections, refurbishing old equipment (both to produce and play records), etc. I expect these are rather heavily correlated, because in 50 years from now, nobody is going to be able to play any of the streaming "content" that flows around. "This is my grandparents favorite Spotify playlist" won't be a thing, but you can certainly go cruising through old photo albums, old record collections, etc.

I remain optimistic that we're in the starting phases of a rejection of the online [handwaves at everything digital consumer tech], and it's going to be aided greatly by stuff exactly like this. Profits and corporate pissing matches over "actually doing something people want to pay money for."

Google and Disney both seem to be demonstrating that once people lose trust in you, it's basically impossible to get it back. Nobody trusts a new Google product will last more than a year or two, which leads to it getting killed off for lack of use, and Disney/Pixar seem to have forgotten that the purpose of the entertainment industry is to "entertain the people who might want to see your movie." Other studios are doing fine, so there's clearly a demand, but Disney has been dropping an impressive string of box office bombs lately, because a lot of people no longer trust them.

Wasn't there some recent article about how Bandcamp got acquired by a competitor and is more or less being left to rot on the vine?

I agree, the FLAC downloads are a major perk of it, and I'll happily buy music there. But I wouldn't trust it to be around long term at this point. It's too consumer-friendly to exist long term in this modern world we live in. :(

It seems that we've entered the rent-seeking phase of corporate capitalism.

Why spend any extra time, money, or energy making new products or services when you can instead make more money doing nothing but using your outsized political and economic power to coerce and extort consumers instead.

At this point it's impossible to see how any new merger or acquisition isn't just another step in the wrong direction, handing over yet more power to a small few.

At what point is a company too large to effectively serve the public interest? How can we turn this process around and redistribute the economic power of these gigantic corporations?

Music is very important to me. So important that I never dared to trust streaming services. Not only do they require an internet connection (something that is not always available), but if the service experiences downtime, license changes, etc., that music is not available.

If I'm going to spend my money on music, I'm going to spend it on music in a form that isn't reliant on the ongoing operation of some service somewhere. I want to add it to my collection so I can actually listen to it anytime and anywhere.

All true -- which is what makes Bandcamp such a treasure. Download the flac and you have it forever (or a reasonable approximation of that).