[tempaccount5050]

No, store it on your computer/phone/iPod. But honestly data centers are probably very efficient for this. I'm not going to do the math, but storing data on flash and serving it to billions of people probably is efficient if I had to guess.

[spinningslate]

I would like to see a full cost comparison. Centralised storage - replicated, distributed and maintained online as necessary - vs media that, once manufactured and distributed, essentially costs nothing to maintain. iPods/phones get replaced much more frequently than LPs/casettes/CDs. And that’s just the resource consumption comparison. There’s then the economic polarisation of wealth to the small handful of online music renters vs distributed ownership (of copies: the original work of art remains with the artist, at least in theory).

[wallst07]

Couldn't you just extrapolate the same reasons people say living in urban areas is more efficient than rural?

It seems trivial to see that storing all the music in 1 or more DCs for the entire world is more efficient than a whole industry to create and redistribute plastics and specialized devices to play this plastic.

[pixl97]

>vs media that, once manufactured and distributed, essentially costs nothing to maintain

Eh, not really, it costs it's own storage and care. This is not free even if you have discounted in to the rest of the cost of your life. Not destroying LPs for example is a good bit of work.

With music itself, it's electronic storage is insanely cheap. One middleling server could easily contain just about the entirety of all mankinds works. Parallel distribution really is the bigger factor, and I guess that costs almost nothing itself. Marketing and software around marketing likely is the majority of the cost here.

Trying to compare a cellphone to a record is just not a really workable thing. People are going to have the cellphone anyway. The fact it is a media player is a welcome bonus.