Once music was divorced from any physical object, its supply so vastly exceeded demand that people simply refused to pay for it. Suddenly, an album was no longer a desirable object worthy of consumption. All digital music listeners are equal. Acquisition is painless. Taste is irrelevant. It is pointless to boast about your iTunes collection, or the quality of your playlists on a streaming service. Music became data, one more set of 1’s and 0’s lurking in your hard drive, invisible to see and impossible to touch. Nothing is less cool than data.
