Mp3s are still good

A sentiment I'm seeing a lot lately is "streaming sucks, I'm going back to physical media." And for the most part I agree. Streaming sucks, streaming has always sucked, and to whatever extent it ever didn't suck, it was a trick to get people hooked so it could eventually start sucking. That is, sucking money out of its customers and sucking benefits away from the artists.

For TV and movies, physical DVDs and blu-rays are still the best option; as far as I know, there are no services that allow you to buy and download DRM-free videos. (If this exists, let me know, I'd love to be proven wrong.) But I'm even seeing talk of going back to phyiscal media for music, and that has me a little confused.

Long before the advent of streaming, we already had a non-physical method of distributing music that worked really well, and that method is still going strong today: Mp3s.

💡 Terminology note

When we talk about digital music today, we're often not literally talking about mpeg audio layer 3 files; often, people are listening to FLAC, .aac and possibly even .opus. But "digital audio files" is a mouthful, so for brevity I refer to the whole category as Mp3s.

My first Mp3 player, the Creative Zen Nano

DRM-free Mp3s are still widely available on bandcamp, amazon, and I presume the Apple music store (whatever they're calling it these days) still offers them. These sound basically as good as it's possible for music to sound, they're quite affordable, and unlike streaming, they provide 100% true ownership over what you buy. You can make as many copies as you want and keep them forever, even long after the store stops selling them or goes away entirely.

Some people seem to feel that you can't truly own the things you buy without a physical object, but I've always felt the opposite: I think a digital file offers much more ownership than any physical medium can provide. If you buy Mp3s, you can make instant backup copies. You can share copies with your friends. You can load them into an audio editor and manipulate them. You can make remixes and mashups. You can load them into audiosurf or make beatmaps for rhythm games. You can edit them into videos. Sure, you don't have the right to re-publish them, but for your own personal use, you can do whatever the heck you want. The only physical medium that offers any of these benefits is CDs, and you have to convert them into digital files yourself. It's a less convenient way to get the same thing. Yeah, you have a physical backup copy, but if you buy the Mp3s you can make your own physical backup copies. Or multiple digital backup copies.

Now, if your interest in physical media is fixing and maintaining old hardware and collecting pre-owned records, tapes, or CDs, I think that's awesome. If that brings you joy, you should keep doing it.¹ Getting use out of old technology is never a bad thing. What I think is weird is that there's a market emerging for new players and new physical music releases. This makes no sense to me.

My second Mp3 player, the Creative Zen

Quality and convenience

So, a FLAC file will sound as good or better than anything you get on a physical format, except CDs, which sound the same. If you have a setup that can play it, FLAC can actually sound better than a CD, with higher bitrates and sampling rates than the 45-year-old format can offer. But even a basic FLAC will sound just as good as a CD and astronomically better than any analog format.

The cassette tape had a brief golden age in the 90s. As technology advanced, they were able to make them sound pretty good. They used high-quality ferricobalt and chromium tape formulations to allow high-quality recordings, they used noise reduction technology to eliminate tape hiss, and they recorded from a digital master to ensure no generational degredation. Other than the digital master, all that stuff is gone. Nobody makes new high-quality tape players, and whatever new tapes you buy are going to be recorded on the most basic Type I ferric tape, the same tape used in 1963.² You really don't want to listen to music like that.

Vinyl records can sound pretty good if you have the right setup, but again, they're objectively not going to sound as good as a digital file, and getting anywhere close is going to cost you a pretty penny. You have a maximum of 45 minutes per record if you want it to sound any good, and you have to get up halfway through and flip the record over. You can't take it with you. The records and equipment are bulky, you'll have to find a place to store all that stuff, and haul it all with you when you move. Finally, if you skipped footnote 1, vinyl record outgassing releases toxic particulates into your home. There's no good reason records should have come back either.

Physicality

One common reason people get into physical media is that they like the physicality itself. This, I can totally relate to. I hate that everything is a touch screen. I miss when things had buttons and switches. I miss slotting media into devices and watching it spin up. I miss when things went clunk and whirr.

But I promise you, speaking as a person born in the 1980s, there's no reason this physicality needs to be connected to music playback. That's how we did it because that's what the technology allowed. If we could have had digital music from the beginning, we would have. Why? Manufacturing and moving things around is expensive and bad for the planet! Sucking petroleum out of the ground and running factories that turn it into thingamajigs that you then have to burn more petroleum shipping around the world for a worse experience than data you could've gotten instantly over a wire makes no sense. If you want more physicality in your life, here are some suggestions: play more video games. If you want a physical music experience, play rhythm games, or for that matter, learn to play an instrument! Build things out of legos, or compatible alternatives. Learn to cross-stitch. Draw. Do calligraphy. Plant a garden. Learn to sew. Learn to repair old gear. Play tabletop games. Learn to do card tricks. Teach yourself to juggle. Sculpt. Whittle. I guarantee any of these options would be more satisfying than music consumption with extra buttons.

My third Mp3 player, the HTC Eris

Mixtapes

"What about mixtapes," you may ask? Making someone a digital music playlist just isn't the same. And yeah, I agree. The care that goes into selecting songs for someone and manually compiling them into a gift, that can be worth a lot.

But there's also a lot you can do with digital files besides making someone a playlist, and with a little imagination, you can still make your loved one something special. You can combine music with photos and videos to create a multimedia mixtape. You can use something like Twine or Renpy to make an interactive mixtape. You could also, say, make a quirky indie RPG with which you include a mixtape of your favorite anime space battle anthems and Czech psychedelic synth funk. I'm a games critter, so that's where my imagination goes first, but I'm sure there's a bunch of stuff you could do. That's the magic of digital files! You can mash them up with a bunch of other digital files! Just try doing that with a cassette: the tape will probably all spool out and gum up your computer.

Conclusion

There are lots of good reasons to give streaming services the ol' heave-ho, but not a lot of good reasons to buy physical music, unless you're going to buy pre-owned equipment and media and prevent it from becoming land waste. There's certainly no reason to buy new plastic to listen to music worse than you could without it.

If you're wanting to drop Spotify and aren't sure what the next step is, here's what I suggest: cancel your subscription, and use the money you were giving to Spotify to instead buy an album or two a month from Bandcamp, or whatever your music budget will allow. Then, pirate the rest.

There's been a lot of anti-piracy psy-op activity since the turn of the millennium, a lot of which is responsible for pushing people to shitty streaming platforms in the first place. But come on. There are obviously no moral or ethical problems with downloading some bits for your own personal use because you can't spend money you don't have. Anyone who suggests otherwise needs to grow up.

In fact, I think piracy is more ethical than using Spotify, because whether you pay a subscription or provide them with ad revenue, not only are the artists not being fairly compensated for their work, you're also helping make this guy richer:

Stop paying this asshole rent for other people's music. Get some Mp3s. You'll be glad you did.