But of course, there's a flip side to having digital media. When my co-worker's car was broken into a couple of years ago, the thief stole a slip-wallet full of CD's.
Real CD's. Insurance covered the broken glass, and damage to the car, but not the CD's. He was SOL. Had they been self-burned CD-R's from a digital-collection, he could have spent $3 on CD-R's to burn new ones. Even if it had been an iPod full of music, the cost would have been less than having to repurchase those 20 or so CD's that were stolen. The moral of the story is to rip & reburn the CD's that you own if you're going to keep them in a car.
I take my retail CDs, rip them to MP3, keep on computer, transfer to iPod, transfer to PS3. If I want to listen to it in the car, I usually burn an MP3 CD so I'm not changing CDs every hour (or listening to the same 12-15 songs for days at a time). This way I get the best of both worlds. Every advantage of having a real recording plus all the advantages of a digital copy. Plus I get to encode the MP3 at whatever bit rate I want with whichever encoder I want (usually 224kbps Stereo in high quality with the LAME encoder using CDex).
For the most part, my CDs sit on a shelf, but they're there and there's no question that I purchased the music. I can have my mp3s all back and named/arranged how I want in a matter of about 4-6 minutes per disc. I'll know they're all exactly the same quality, ripped at exactly the same time with exactly the same settings. I'll know there are no errors, missing pieces, no "bit rot", and no imperfections not present on the original recording.
I hope that didn't come out like an argument (it wasn't meant to be...Again, just my opinion on the subject and how I see it).
If there ever comes a time (there will, but I mean in my lifetime) when I'm no longer able to get physical copies of new music, I hope I hate all the new music and wouldn't buy it anyway
As for your comment about 35mm film. I'm all for digital cameras. There's an actual advantage to them; you don't have to get any prints of any pictures that didn't turn out perfect. With music, the only advantage is convenience, and usually it comes at a price: quality (I do realise you can download tracks encoded with the FLAC from some services and that's why I said "usually":))
