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I'm five years your junior and not in academia.

My music collection, my peers music collections, my mother's music collection... they are Spotify.

I have a friend who DJ's and he has the tracks themselves, but only to remove the internet dependency. The consumers of his kind of cutting edge not on Spotify music get it on Soundcloud.

Tech books? I do have some. I did buy some this year. However my consumption of blog posts, wikis, pdfs of papers, forums, moocs and stack overflows dwarfs all physical reading.

I hate to say it, but production has seen movement away from files. There is a Photoshop extension that allows graphic designers to "connect" the image into the wordpress assets (which auto creates varioud sizes) and tye marketer selects the asset from a web ui list.

I've seen CMS' that let you write js "handlers" that are shoved into the db and can be attached to buttons or page loads etc.

For your last point - moving between clouds - you use a service. Multcloud is just one example.

Its scary just how far things have come.

Wonder how Turbosquid is faring with that these days

PixelSquid now has a subscription option. I think the issue with TurboSquid is that convenience is less important. Spotify is ok with giving people access to songs knowing that they can easily rip them and put them online because Spotify's experience is a lot better than just searching for ripped songs. With TurboSquid I think people would probably just turn around and sell the models online and then others could just pirate them. Maybe I'm wrong, though - I don't know a ton about the industry.

You're not out of touch with the technically-inclined. That's not the majority of people. Everything you describe w/ incredulity is what I see, in some part, the majority of non-technical people people doing. They usually have a phone as their primary computing device, too, which further erodes the concept of owning your data (and of files, for that matter).

Well, 15 years ago, the technically non-inclined didn't own many files either... they just didn't use computers much.

Sure they did. Seemed like everyone had a laptop with oodles of malware, popups, browser toolbars and it took 5 or 10 minutes just to open iTunes or Winamp. Loads of techs had a lucrative, but annoying sideline decrapifying laptops - or just annoying with relatives and friends. Then they'd install Kazaa again and be back to square one. :)

If you said 20 or 25 years ago I'd agree, but 15 years ago is a different beast entirely. My ludite mother, who finally got a smartphone _this year_, had already come to terms with needing to know how to use her computer including transferring files to flash drives

Because my phone's not rooted, there are hundreds of files on my phone i don't 'own'. I can't access them, in many cases I can't even see them. My phone tells me i don't have permission. If they were.kine, i could do whatever i like with them.The OS and apps on my phone can access them though, modify them, delete them. WhatsApp for example can delete pictures and messages from my phone at the whim of the person that sent them, if left in the default folder.

Never give anything to your phone that you don't have stored elsewhere on hardware you own.

> I couldn't find half of my music library on amazon, let alone the money to actually buy it.

If those songs disappeared from your favorite streaming apps where would you get them? If you don't have a copy, it can be gone at any time with no warning or notice to you and you'd be left with nothing. If I were one copyright dispute or licensing problem away from losing my media collection I'd be panicked. Music streaming has it's place, but you shouldn't expect that you'll be able to hear those songs tomorrow let alone share them with your kids and your children's children.

If you value something, save a copy of it for yourself in a format free from DRM or accept that one day it will be gone and you will have nothing but your memories and loss.

This concern seems bizarre. Essentially every song is on Spotify (unless it's very small in which case it's on soundcloud or something). This isn't a unique property either - Apple Music replicates it and YouTube/vevo come close. There's good reason to believe that streaming services, or something equivalent/better will continue to exist and I will continue to be able to get the songs I want. When I listen to a song my primary concern isn't about being able to share it with my children's children or whatever. I'll probably forget about it by next year. How often do you dig up songs you listened to 20 years ago?

> Essentially every song is on Spotify

Hardly, but their selection is impressive. What music Spotify has available is entirely dependent on agreements with the artist or, far more often, the music label. Those agreements are subject to change or expire, and songs are routinely offered for a time then removed (sometimes to be added back later) and can be subject to additional limitations such as having their availability limited to specific countries. It's basically the same situation as Netflix with movies and TV shows. Sometimes you can find copies uploaded by others to youtube, pirate trackers, or other hosting sites and sometimes you can't.

Streaming services will likely continue to exist for a very long time. Streaming services that provide the specific songs you want to hear or enjoy on Spotify today are not guaranteed and that likelihood decreases significantly as time goes on and your tastes diverge from the mainstream. If all you listen to are top 40 radio hits you'll probably never have a problem finding copies of the songs you like in some form or another. Whatever has replaced Spotify 50 years from now will likely still be full of The Beatles and Brittany Spears. Even today I find there are songs that are hard to find, albums that are out of print and not available from streaming sites. As people move away from physical media and depend on the shifting sands of streaming music providers I expect the problem will only grow with time.

> How often do you dig up songs you listened to 20 years ago?

Constantly. Not that I'm only listening to songs from 20+ years ago, but my current playlist has songs from the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s and most playlists I create tend to as well. Not everyone cares about music and may not mind if they never get to hear their favorite songs again by next year, but I suspect many of the younger ones who feel that way now will at one point in their lives want to go back and hear songs they grew up listening to.

> Essentially every song is on Spotify

Lucio Battisti is possibly the most popular songwriter in Italy ever. His songs were added to Spotify one month ago for the first time. And even now, the catalogue is not complete.

The Beatles today are there, but they were missing for a long time. King Crimson have been added in June.

I don't know what you mean by "essentially every song", but they are just now adding albums from the most popular artists, I would think many minor things are still missing

> I'm not aware of anyone storing family photos on GMail.

https://www.google.com/photos/about/

2010: There's an App for that

2019: There's a Google service for that*

*: at risk of shutting down depending on the number of years since last product update

Hah! Take my upvote. Also: s/2019/2006/

https://gcemetery.co/2006/