Tom Rizzuto

And in the world that we live in today, where so few actual people have so much control over these big media conglomerates and have the power to take things off of streaming instantly, I think we have to ask ourselves,

Why would they do that?

Is it a control thing?

Are they hiding something from us?

Is it censorship?

Physical media keeps the promise of permanence.

in a way that streaming simply cannot.

That's coming up right after a short break.

Bone music is a relic of a very interesting time in world history.

A time when the governments of the Soviet Union restricted access to American music like jazz and rock and roll so tightly that in many cases, they wouldn't even let their citizens own or listen to this music.

Now, the young people of the Soviet Union wanted to hear this music so badly that they figured out that they could actually bootleg American records by cutting sound grooves into discarded X-ray plates, in many cases preserving the original image of the X-ray.

Now, these records, if you want to call them that, they looked awesome.

They didn't sound so good.

I don't think you're particularly surprised to hear that, but they look cool and that's important.

And even more importantly, it allowed these young Soviets to hear this music and to own it and to distribute it to the people around them.

Now, if you've heard about bone music before today, you probably heard of it as like a historical curiosity or maybe even a symbol of defiance against the censorship of the Soviet Union.

And the truth is, bone music is both of those things.

But in the age that we're living in right now, I think that the story of bone music gives us some things to think about in the way that we consume media in our own lives.

I'm talking specifically about streaming media.

The streaming revolution brought so many wonderful things into our lives.