No, we've simply gone from primarily direct purchase to primarily a subscription model, which is common in a lot of other markets.

And nobody has actually abandoned local files, you can buy and download more music than ever before, and own it forever (if you have backups).

You have to go to boutique retailers to get files that are anywhere near the quality of commercially-available CDs. And while subscription models may be common that doesn't make them pro-consumer, the right thing to do, or even a good idea.

Bandcamp is pretty big nowadays, but it could still be considered a boutique retailer when it comes to pop music. It depends a lot on the genres you prefer. No matter what audiophiles claim, 320kbps MP3/AAC/Ogg/etc. files are equivalent audible quality to CDs, and that's what most online music stores sell.

Subscriptions have existed for hundreds of years, for anything from newspapers to soap. Priced correctly, subscriptions are perfectly fine. You pay a recurring fee for a service, and in return you don't have to worry about logistics or storage.

A subscription model could even work perfectly fine for cars (and does, in many cities), as long as it's correctly managed and fairly priced. Pay a set monthly fee, and you get access to a range of cars, parked in a central location near where you live. You don't have to worry about maintenance or depreciation, the car sharing company handles all of that. In return, the monthly rate is lower than what most people would pay to actually own and maintain a car of their own. It works because the costs are shared across a lot more people.

I know a lot of people prefer to own stuff, and I get it in a lot of cases, especially when you know you'll need the item in question for a long time, need to modify or otherwise do something that's outside of a normal use case. On the other hand, I think this race towards owning as much stuff as possible is driving western society to destruction.

> I think this race towards owning as much stuff as possible is driving western society to destruction.

I agree except it is only through ownership that you are free of others' (e.g. your rentors') control. When that control is used almost universally to expand the financial relationship between rentor and rentee, or to enrich the rentor at the further expense of the rentee, it is imperative for individuals to remove themselves from its influence.

Also, if you load 320kbps MP3 and 14.4khz WAV into a spectral analyzer you will find differences, which will be detectable to anyone with the right critical listening skills.

There are good and bad subscription services, it has always been like that.

>Also, if you load 320kbps MP3 and 14.4khz WAV into a spectral analyzer you will find differences, which will be detectable to anyone with the right critical listening skills.

Do you listen with your eyes? A spectrogram can't tell you what your ears will hear.

The only way to know, is to do a proper double blind ABX test on files you encode yourself from known original files. You can use Foobar2000 with the ABX Comparator plugin for this purpose. I think you'll be surprised at just how low you can take the bitrate even on an ancient format like MP3, before you can tell a difference.