Pour one out for physical media

It’s the end of an era. NPR reports:

Netflix will end its DVD-by-mail service

The transmogrification of digital media in my lifetime has been jarring.

Consider what has happened in the past 100 years.

• Radio became widespread in the 1920s. Suddenly, people had access to news, music, and propaganda every evening.
• Vinyl disc recordings became available to the public. That hit critical mass in 1948, just in time to turbocharge the careers of a gazillion artists. Without the vinyl LP you would never have known of Frank Sinatra, Chuck Berry, The Beatles, and so many more.
• Everything audio turned digital in the 1980s. That was a huge benefit for bands like Pink Floyd, who were able to sell a CD of Dark Side of the Moon to the same people who had already paid for an LP.
• Meanwhile, Blockbuster Video was getting off the ground in the mid-1980s. And all of a sudden you didn’t have to watch whatever the networks were showing on the TV.

Physical media was a very big deal for a very long time. Today, hipsters collect vinyl and everything else is digital.

Does that make the world better? Worse? Talk to me.