Yeah, I remember. My favorite DOS game was Scorched Earth, which fit on a high density 1.44MB floppy disk. But that was the point of the article. Space used to be at a premium and a terabyte used to feel like more space than I’d ever need. Now a terabyte is only just enough for portable devices because the cost of extra capacity was increasing so fast and development of space saving tech seemed like a waste of time, but that trend of increasing capacity and decreasing cost has significantly plateaued (as shown by the graph in the article).

If by nuts you mean, a very modest low single digit terabyte range. Which, according to the game sizes cited in the article could only hold around 6-10 games per terabyte. Given the way games tend to disappear from online sources over time, that doesn’t seem like enough space to me to really keep all those digital purchases. I guess if most of them will become abandonware eventually anyway when the companies shut down their servers, it hardly matters.

Songtradr is a music licensing middle man, charging both artists and those looking to license their music, and somehow despite money coming in at both ends they were losing money in 2022. That does not bode well for the status quo at their new acquisition, Bandcamp, especially considering that their very first move was to fire half the staff. Songtradr doesn’t care about artists or music fans, their singular and only priority is entangling artists and music distributors in their licensing scheme. They’re middlemen. Middlemen are great for exploiting the free market for profit. Middlemen are at best an additional drain on profits for everyone else. Bandcamp was one of the few places you could buy digital music that really felt like ownership and not licensing locked behind DRM. The songtradr acquisition has the potential to kill development of that kind of digital and DRM-free distribution marketplace and limit investment in anything else that tries to do something similar. If songtradr continuing to lose money after the Bandcamp acquisition, it will be an example to all investors that DRM-free digital music cannot be profitable.

My little brother refused to wear his new air walks to school any more because the kids told him they weren’t real because the style he had used a lowercase a logo. Same energy.