About how the "masters" for a lot of recent music are disappearing at an alarming rate. Because there *are* no masters, really... no master tapes, anyway. The "master" is an mp3 , and there's no responsible label librarian to curate it, so it circulates and after people (as they are now wont to do) delete it from their hard drives after so much time, the track is gone.

It's alarming how often you see artists (well... let's be real: rappers) admitting that they have no copies, no records whatsoever of songs they did like 5 years ago.

(Another consequence of the absence of label oversight and QC that's bothered me lately is that it is sometimes hard to confirm the actual title of a song. Like a third of the blogs call it "I Ain't Rockin with That," another third call it "I Ain't Rocking with This," then the remaining third offers you variations of both names with different "Rockins" "Rockings" "Dis" and "Dat" and then some of them call the song "Fly My Way"... the artist's official VEVO and Soundcloud accounts can't even agree on what the song is called)

But the fact that these tracks get deleted so quickly, that everybody seems to erase them at some point speaks to the general attitude of disposability towards music these days but I don't necessarily it is that much connected to the quality of the music as it is to the fact that we take accessibility for granted.

For me... when it comes to quality, from my own aesthetic and sentimental POV, you're not getting much higher than Off The Wall I listen to at least one song from that album probably every single day. And yet I realize that I don't have it in my iTunes library. I don't have it on CD. I *might* have it on vinyl, in one of my backcrates, in storage... but I don't have a ready copy in any format.

I don't need one. I can access it via Spotify or YouTube or some other application almost anytime I want.

What I do have on my hard drive though are the Off The Wall demos and outtakes. I need to have those not because I enjoy them more than the actual album but because I know they are not as readily accessible if I do need them.

In fact, when I look at my iTunes library, a good deal of it is stuff that I can't really get elsewhere: stuff I've digitized from vinyl and cassette or ripped from OOP CDs, rare mixtapes and exclusive tracks, etc.