I meant from a user's perspective. You shouldn't care if the song is stored in /foo/bar or in a remote database somewhere in the cloud. You access it through some obvious interface e.g. iTunes. Having 'file' as a central concept of accessing data doesn't have much connection to the actual way it is used. My vim config file doesn't have much in common with a song I've just downloaded. It is stored the same way, but that's about it.