I generally agree on all of your points. Trust me, some of the CDs I lost in that flood were extremely rare and don't exist anywhere to purchase or download. Th

I generally agree on all of your points. Trust me, some of the CDs I lost in that flood were extremely rare and don't exist anywhere to purchase or download. They were tragic losses. For years I had a discogs.com account that I meticulously updated with everything in my collection. I get that there are differences between what is legally available as the "best" remastered version of the album and the original version as it was released on record or tape or CD back in the day. But if your goal is not to give money to the artist and instead just find the best version of the song, you can usually better do that through piracy. The artist doesn't get any money either way - whether you bought a second-hand album from your local record store or downloaded a version online - who cares? The one case where original media is interesting is if nobody made a version available online via piracy. And that's a sad state of affairs. As I mentioned earlier - I have lost dozens of CDs that never got released online, because they were small runs on indie labels or just independently released back in the day before the internet was a thing... Well now every time one of those sorts of CDs gets destroyed in a flood, it's one less copy of that song in the wider world. If anything, people should be uploading the fuck out of all they got, because otherwise all those great indie artists of the 90s (never mind the decades prior) will disappear into obscurity and what's the point of their music then? Digitize everything is my opinion. Digitize it, upload it, share it. It's the best way to preserve the culture of past years/decades/eras.