Preservation of Correspondence - And Media

Sorry, but you are extremely wrong here. There is a huge amount of music that is only available on LP, 45, 78, or other even old formats. Most early rock and roll, like 1950/60s rockabilly, has not made it past the 45 format, and the same is true for old soul. Lots of live jazz never jumped off the LP. There is a ton of stuff from the 1980s, like dance remixes and B sides, that never made it. To the extreme, there is the whole bootleg market. Lots of this stuff is super obscure, so it may not be a huge loss. There are a few suprises. For example, the entire Beach Boys backcatalog will likely never get completely released on CD. The Beach Boys - one of the biggest moneymakers a record company has seen in 50 years! There are tons of strange versions and demos of their songs that were sold to minor labels that are long gone. Untangling the rights to get them released would probably be more expensive than the return from the relatively very small market that demands them. Yes, there is a market for this weird stuff. Music geeks can be worse completionist collectors than most - they have to have everything. Sort of like how some of us have to have every DEC VT terminal or PDP-8. Anyway, this is the big reason why you can, with looking, still buy a turntable to play your records. The LPs-sound-better crowd is a tiny fraction of what it used to be, now that many of the early CDs have been properly remastered (I dare people on this list NOT to start an analog-is-better audio thread, please). The turntable market is now driven by those people that want or need to play a very obsolete format. CDs are falling into the same situation. Whatever the next audio media turns out to be, there will be vast amounts of material that will not make the jump, and some of this will be significant cultural material. People will demand to be able to play this, so the CD format will continue to be supported for years to come. -- Will