TED Talks Daily
The problem with streaming — and the case for physical media | Tom Rizzuto
20 May 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hugh. We have never had more access to music, movies, and media, and yet we've never been so close to losing it all.
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?
That's music professor Tom Rizzuto. In this talk, he traces a line from Cold War Soviet teenagers bootlegging jazz onto discarded x-ray plates all the way to the streaming platforms we use every day.
Chapter 2: What is the impact of streaming on our media consumption?
His argument isn't anti-streaming or digital technology. It's pro-permanent physical record.
Physical media keeps the promise of permanence. in a way that streaming simply cannot. That's coming up right after a short break.
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And now, our TED Talk of the day.
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.
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Chapter 3: How did Soviet teenagers create bone music?
It may be an underground thing like the bone music was in the Soviet Union. But I do think that we have to think about it. I think that physical media should remain a part of our media world. And I believe that as we move into this new phase of world history, Preserving physical media should be a priority as we move into the future. Thank you.
That was Tom Rizzuto at TEDxMali University in Long Island, New York in 2026. If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at TED.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective.
This talk was fact-checked by the TED Research Team and produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little, and Tansika Sungmarnivong. This episode was mixed by Christopher Fasey-Bogan. Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Balarezo. I'm Elise Hugh. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening.