this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2026
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I do feel the more and more pervasive all of these subscription models become the more compelling data hoarding becomes. The main problem being as it gets worse, storage prices keep climbing. Physical media is cool and all but collecting DVD, Blu-ray, books and CDs or any combination of the 4 quickly becomes a physical space issue. Collecting all of this media digitally and keep it all on HDD space is a much more attractive solution. Give you ‘physical’ forever access and doesn’t take up so much space.
This is just another oscillation cycle in the generally declining cost per bit of storage. We recently went through an oversupply price crash: 2023 prices of $40 per TB and less were an aberration due to supply creating a glut beyond what market demand would consume at any price.
Now we're hitting a double spike both from production ramp-down after the 2023 over-supply, coupled with an unanticipated demand spike with LLMs in 2025 and beyond...
How long before we're back down below $40/TB ? If you could predict that, you could make so much money on Wall Street that you woudn't care about the cost of storage anymore.
Some of us figured this out 20 years ago and never turned back. (I figured it out about the time that I realized I had more music in my mp3 collection than the college radio station I volunteered at in 2000.)
My Cinemageddon account turned 18 earlier this year.
I'm evolving a "music player" system which basically consists of a fleet of individual players, each with a full copy of the music library because, even at today's storage prices, why not? Storage for 10,000 songs at higher fidelity than a brand new LP vinyl album costs less (adjusted for inflation) than an album of 8 songs did back in the 1980s, and only 2 of those 8 songs were usually any good...
So, have a music player in every bedroom, living room, family room, kitchen, car, patio - turn them on when you want, synchronize them when you want - split off and listen to your own playlist when you want - and every player contains a synchronized backup of all the music so you can just drive off with one, go completely off-grid and never interrupt the playlist. The only network traffic is from your phone interface to choose your playlist or synchronize with players nearby - or across the planet.
Finally, a way to properly listen to The Flaming Lips' Zaireeka without needing to own four fucking cd players and stereos.