- and my father has a trash bag in his hand. In the trash bag: my entire CD-R binder. The Euclid '04 live recording. The acoustic demos from that basement session. The 147 WITNESS COMPILATION I spent THREE WEEKENDS assembling with cross-fades and proper track ordering. He says "CDs sind tot, Lukas. Nobody uses these anymore. I'm clearing space."
I had to sit him down and explain - in German, slowly, like he's a child - that 1) optical media is a physical archive format with a shelf life of decades when stored correctly, 2) streaming services can and will remove content at the provider's whim (Gabriel's SoundCloud purge of '05 is STILL not fully archived)
, and 3) you cannot HAND someone a Spotify playlist at a vigil when you need them to hear the 3:47 hum at the right bitrate.He looked at me and said "you can put music on a USB stick."
DAD. A USB STICK IS NOT A BINDER. YOU CAN'T DECORATE THE SPINE. YOU CAN'T WRITE SETLIST NOTES IN THE MARGINS IN SHARPIE. YOU CAN'T TRADE A USB STICK WITH A GUY AT A GAS STATION IN PENNSYLVANIA AT 2AM AND HAVE IT MEAN THE SAME THING AS HANDING OVER A DISC WITH "GABRIEL LIVE EUCLID - DO NOT COPY - MATTHEW 24:36" HAND-LETTERED ON IT.
I rescued the binder. It's now in my locked desk drawer. But this is the cultural moment we're in - people genuinely think physical media is obsolete because they've never had a file disappear from a hard drive.
CDs are not dead. CDs are the VELLUM of the digital age.
Anyone else fighting this war with family? Or am I the only one here who still burns discs for distribution at meetups?
e: typo - "vellum" not "vellom"
