Comments by "Rob Fraser" (@krashd) on "1998: Will MP3 Make PHYSICAL MEDIA Obsolete? | Inside Tracks | Retro Tech | BBC Archive" video.

  1.  @Mondegreen---SFW  Yeah, not sure what that clown was on about, in 2002 I had a cable modem and was able to download Gangs of New York, admittedly it came in three .mpg files of 699MB each that had to be watched on a computer or burned to CDs and watched on a DVD player. The jump from downloadable music to downloadable films happened practically overnight.
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  2. "playlists are how new music gets discovered these days" Just as mix tapes/CDs were how music got discovered before...
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  3. Ironically the Fraunhofer Society (then known as an institute) that created the MP3 format warned the major record companies that it could do horrific damage to them if they didn't embrace it early and start to monetise it. They failed to embrace it.
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  4. The World Wide Web was an upgrade of the original Internet that made it much more accessible and easier to use. The EU tried to get people to adopt WWW or "Internet Superhighway" as a way to distinguish the post-1991 Internet from the pre-1991 Internet but neither name really stuck.
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  5. At one point software companies and some music publishers advocated for making backups of your purchase, they would often print on the original disk/disc "Back me up and then put me me somewhere safe". Crazy how all that changed.
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  6. You would require an army capable of infiltrating several global cities simultaneously to bring the Internet down (by destroying or shutting down one quarter of the master DNS servers) and even then it would only be offline for maybe a day as the remaining master servers would remap themselves around the missing ones. Also big sites like Spotify have backups of backups, any time they experience a drive failure and lose a drive with 10,000 songs the backup stored in a different location will put those 10,000 songs on to a new drive, at no point is there ever less than two copies of something in the cloud. Lastly, most people download the albums they own so even if Spotify did go away you would still have your songs on your phone or music player.
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