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What’s Lost When the Cloud Replaces CDs | The New Yorker

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Alex Ross on the pleasures and frustrations of Spotify: “There are legitimate questions about the aesthetics and ethics of streaming.”

Save this story Save this story What was once known as building a library is now considered hoarding. Illustration by Mauricio Alejo Recently, while moving my CD collection to new shelving, I struggled with feelings of obsolescence and futility. Why bother with space-devouring, planet-harming plastic objects when so much music can be had at the touch of a trackpad—on Spotify, Pandora, Beats Music, and other streaming services that rain sonic data from the virtual entity known as the Cloud? What is the point of having amassed, say, the complete symphonies of the Estonian composer Eduard Tubin (

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