Tom Rizzuto

It's also not what I'm here to talk about today.

I'm here today to talk about the power of physical media and why it might be important for us to keep around as we move into our constantly evolving media landscape.

Physical media keeps the promise of permanence in a way that streaming simply cannot.

So what do I mean by this?

Well, let's take our example of our Soviet kids, right?

This American music meant so much to them that they took tremendous risks to get it and to get it out there to their friends.

This music inspired them.

So much so that when the Berlin Wall finally fell down, people started saying that it was the American music, as well as many other very important things, that caused these kids to look at the world and to imagine the changes that they wanted to see in their own societies.

So imagine something.

Imagine if all media was streaming back then.

How easy would it have been for their governments or whoever to just shut off access to it?

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?

Are there messages they don't want us hearing?

And the truth of the matter is it could be any of those things.

But physical media, actual CDs, actual DVDs, if you're as old as me, cassettes, VHSs, whatever, all of these things keep the media in our hands.

They make it harder for us to lose.