The big issue is that physical media degrades. A cassette tape wont sound the same as it did after just existing for 20 years. CD’s and Vinyl records if kept really well can last for 100 years or so but are delicate in other ways and a bad record player can cause permanent damage.

Preserving the experiences of others, art, media is important, but at the end of the day nothing we do is permanent. I know that thanks to online archives I can go and find old music if I need to. I am glad some folks preserve hard copies but a preserved collection isn’t really a functional one and a functional one isn’t really going to last 50 or 60 years at the same quality as what you can get from streaming.

This is why I used Spotify listeners and not plays or ticket sales or album sales. It’s a metric that doesn’t really require a band to be currently active. New hits will clearly improve the metric but we’re talking here specifically about a person’s outreach today and influence on a voting population.

The idea that more individual people listened to her music than had a single Beatles song in their playlist or a single Michael Jackson song in their playlist is pretty insane. I know I listen to at least one Beatles song a month, it doesn’t matter if it is new.

45 million monthly listeners on Spotify. That is 10 million more than The Beatles right now. 60th overall on the top list of plays just above Michael Jackson. Half the amount of TSwift

So they are a well known artist.

The intent is to make the distributed version more true to the real original. None of us got to see the original. The original is a bunch of data on various machines. What we saw was a low quality save file of the original, cut down and watered down to the specs of 4:3 CRT televisions and broadcast hardware of the time. That version develops artefacts not intended when distributed on modern media.

Now this probably isn’t using original source files but it is possible. Remaster as a term also is used when they take the final master copy and rerun it through more modern technologies to get a cleaner output which is what I expect happened here.

Remaster doesn’t change the original art or animation. Sometimes it is a rerender of original source files. Sometimes it is a treatment of the existing master files. It just adds fidelity to the picture and sometimes audio. Fixes things like low framerate, weird lighting effects, that kind of thing.

Every PC will be using AI as we move forward and thinking they won’t seems as head in the sand to me as thinking the Internet would be a fad. Remember how awful the Internet was in the 80s and 90s? AI is in a similar spot today.

Why would I read a manual when I can ask an AI to summarize it and give me pages so I can confirm? If I’m trying to do a task I know a million people have solved like Python code to translate XLSX and CSV to JSON and back, why wouldn’t I use AI for that?

Trusting AI outright and not reviewing the answers is silly, but doing research with AI is soooo much faster. Also the majority of articles and manuals you find online written in the past year used AI and you can have CoPilot spit it out to you WITH the original sources that the website/blog hides.

The idea that AI isn’t trustworthy is silly, because no one is trustworthy. You should always have been double checking things for yourself, but sitting and struggling through something for 2 days is foolish when AI could do 80% of the work for you in seconds.