LONG BEACH, Calif. — A controversial report released by The Center for Technology today concluded that “probably like 90%” of all individual music collections are now lost to time on a hard drive somewhere in a closet.
“It all started when I got this riff stuck in my head from a band I saw in high school, but I totally couldn’t remember their name,” explained Baton Rouge resident and Last.fm enthusiast Yoshiko Cass. “I knew I had their demo saved on an external hard drive, but I couldn’t fucking find it anywhere. The tragic part is knowing I might never hear those songs again — there’s no way that band is on Spotify.”
“In fact, most of the music on that hard drive probably isn’t,” Cass bragged.
Sensing a nationwide issue, researchers set out to determine the degree to which other music collections have been devastated by factors like cloud storage, streaming, and “how no one uses Zune anymore.”
“Throughout the study, most participants rambled about how everyone streams things and artists don’t make albums, just singles,” said lead researcher Linda Isaacs. “Although I do kind of agree that it’s sad how no one digs through their extensive mp3 library to make nine-hour playlists anymore; everyone just obeys what their Spotify and Pandora AI robot overlords tell them to listen to. It’s like they want us to forget about all those great bands who never uploaded their music, built a following, or kept existing into the 2010s.”
Meanwhile, other sources disputed the findings as “not mathematically sound” and “pulled out of their asses.”
“This study lacks all sorts of key information,” explained professor of communications at UCLA, Dr. Marie Dunn. “Of those hard drive music collections, how many songs were mislabeled Limewire downloads? And the study only looked at mp3s on hard drives, which is very narrow criteria — half of those music collections must be in lost CD wallets with no jewel cases or inserts to tell their story, or on records owned by people who never got around to replacing the needle on the Crosley they bought from Target.”
The research team is next planning to find out what percentage of all VHS collections contain unwatched copies of Jerry Maguire purchased at the thrift store down the street.