Some time ago I wrote an op-ed about "The Great Digital Swindle" - and this was in reaction to Neil Young's promotion of PONO and some really expensive downloads of high-resolution music that you probably already own in some other format.

The upshot of my rant was simply that when you purchase a download, you don't really own it. You have rented it, at best, for an indeterminate amount of time. Unlike physical media (such as a CD, cassette, or vinyl record), it's unlawful for you to re-sell your download to someone else in the event that you decide you no longer like it or want it.

The sheer physicality of physical media confers upon you certain ownership rights - rights that you do not have with virtual (downloaded or streaming) media.

I've shared my opinion in prior posts that optical discs such as CD and DVD will be going away. Manufacturing is drying up for the optical media itself, as well as for the optical disc drives that make it possible to replay that media. Remember laser disks? VHS tapes? These are other formats that were killed off by better technology - and so it will soon come to pass with optical media.

Technical evolution is all about survival of the fittest, and when it comes to digital media especially the problem that was initially solved by CD was solved even better by newer tech. You may think that CD's value proposition was better resolution, or lower noise floor, or higher dynamic range (theoretically), or ease of use. 


CD's value proposition was that it packed more information into a smaller, lighter, convenient and portable format. It was cheaper to produce than LP records, cheaper to ship, cheaper to store, you could fit more of them on the record store shelves, and they wouldn't wear out a little with each play the way that cassettes did.

The main value for optical media generally was that - in its various forms - it was a very compact, high density data medium.

This has been surpassed by more convenient, higher-density, more compact and easily transportable media and methods - namely: downloads and streaming.

So because the value proposition of optical media has left the building, so has the reason to produce optical media. As remarked in prior posts, computers are no longer coming with optical drives installed because almost all software is downloaded nowadays.

This is why I pronounced CD as dead. Not because it isn't a pleasurable format to listen to, and not because there won't be a lively collector's market - as there is now - in the future. Only because it cannot survive as a manufactured format into the future because its major industrial-demand lifelines are drying up quickly.

Which leaves the only remaining physical format for music: vinyl records.

If you want to preserve that portion of your purchase that actually confers property rights to you - you will buy physical media. That may not be important to you, of course, but it is a value proposition that is more concrete than any arguments favoring the delightfulness of the LP's sonic attributes.

(some might argue that cassette tapes are also making a comeback, and that might also be true ... but not yet strong enough to be a force in the market).

CDs, DVDs, etc are a cinch to pirate simply because the thing that made them valuable was also the thing that helped to kill them - the object itself was ostensibly worthless, so the data it contained was copied (bit for bit) and distributed for free over torrents and gnutella networks. I've heard of people borrowing all kinds of CDs from the library, ripping them to their computer, and then returning them to the library ... and doing this over and over again. This is because the CD is seen as being nothing more than a container for perfectly-replicable data, and the data is too easy to access and copy.
The software industry (including the entertainment segment) spent millions and billions trying to protect its IP from piracy, but it was futile ... they would, at best, catch some 13 year old kid sharing a massive playlist over LimeWire and threaten him with $200k in fines and life in prison (or something like that). The big pirates of software never got caught. What had made digital storage valuable to IP producers is also what made it easy to pirate: convenient, dense, cheaply transportable, infinitely copyable formats.

But an LP? That is truly a bitch to pirate. Sure - make copies of the LP by recording them to your computer ... it's still not the same. With the LP, the container ALSO has value - the kind of value that no digital medium seems to offer.

The only way that record stores (see? we still call them record stores ...) can stay in business, big or small, is to be able to sell physical media. Because optical media is deep into the process of going away, and because cassette tapes are still just a niche curiosity, what remains - again - is the venerable, difficult to pirate LP record.

Saving the life of record stores is important to folks like me, who enjoy the various dimensions of experience that record stores offer. You can not only thumb through countless titles in various genres, you can get interesting advice and suggestions from the record store employees or from fellow shoppers. It's a social space - a real, actual, physical social space where there are actual human beings hanging out in real-time!

Because of these things (and more) the record shop is a community treasure that needs preserving. Facebook is fine, forums are fine, blogs are fine ... but none of them can truly take the place of the neighborhood record store - and there won't be a record store if there are no records (or CDs) to sell.


Physical media are important to both the purchaser and to the producer, as well as to the reseller in between. The physical medium confers certain property rights to the consumer once they've purchased it, and makes retail commerce possible in order to support IP producers and resellers, supporting all kinds of working people in the process. Because digital, even when stored on physical media, is easily pirated ... there is no realizable value to it in the long term.

Vinyl LPs, on the other hand, provide utterly realizable value to all parties because they are not only physical media - they are incredibly difficult to pirate.

It just so happens that they sound wonderful, too ...

Chris Sommovigo September 14, 2017