I disagree and so would millions of other people as the world is full of collectors but split across different formats. Originally Betamax, vhs, laser to dvd, blu ray and now streaming.
People like the idea of owning their libraries and more so for music as i think music is more personal to people and you listen to it more than once.
My point was that Amazon have devalued the physical media product through heavy discounting and there cheap prime video which has 1000’s of music and video shops out of business and even some big major retailers and now the competition is gone they are raising their prices Which is now hurting the consumer. It’s been their business model in other categories as well.
You make a good point about the environmental factor of physical but then they say streaming uses a lot of energy as well and could be equally as bad in the long run due to all the data centres etc. I suppose time will tell on this point.
You can still own your digital music. That's more where I'd go myself. Despite that I am a lazy Apple Music user. The problem with having physical media has always been quite large for me. At one point I had about 500 records, 800 CDs and 300 DVDs. Not a huge collection but a significant one. The end game was that I found some serious disadvantages to doing this. Firstly finding recordings and actually obtaining them was a costly exercise both in time and in expenditure especially with the somewhat scarcity of particular pieces. The storage and maintenance and moving it was quite difficult (I moved house a couple of times) and when it came to having kids, the complexity of sharing it was multiplied. Eventually the collecting and maintenance became a net loss to the thing I really dented wanted to do which was listen to it. Also due to the media types, particularly when it comes to efficiency, I probably only listened to 10% of the collection right down in some cases to 1 track on a CD of 15 tracks.
As for the value, the medium has no value, only the data on it. The value of the medium was scarcity and control. Streaming merely broke scarcity. I can now stream and cache "high value" music I could not access before because the scarcity is gone. That's not unique to Amazon.
So I was in Central Asia for 2 weeks recently and I had my entire library with me, and only the focused bits of media I actually wanted to listen to.
Streaming has an extremely low energy cost. At rest it requires no energy. During transit, even a 4k stream is insignificant these days. Compare to the distribution of a physical CD to a single person, just the last mile energy cost of getting it to your door is higher. Notably as well the data centre single budgetary point is power so they optimise everything to extreme levels.
I get it but it's a thing of the past. An SSD filled with FLAC files is a good middle point.
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