FIles

A file still remains the material artifact of ownership. Even though a file is not physical - it is just a sequence of bits, you can own a file. Have it on a hard drive of your computer, back it up to a USB pen drive, upload it somewhere etc. It clearly is yours. Handing over the file to a service which promises to continue serving you the content of the file may mean giving up the ownership. 

This is exactly what happened to Google Music. It lured users (including myself) to upload music files they owned to continue listening to this music on any device, thanks to the synchronization feature. I uploaded the entire music collection I owned and enjoyed this music syncing automatically to my Android phone and to my iPad. But of course I kept the copies of the files. They cane up handy when I realized that to listen to music streamed from my Garmin watch, i needed the files to be actually uploaded over USB to the watch.

And they are handy again as Google continues the tradition of dropping the services. Google Music will disappear soon. The music you own will not, but surprise-suprprise, Google now wants you to subscribe to YouTube premium (which is $10.month) to continue listening to your own music - the music you bought and uploaded to Google). I understand there is value in having it all synchronized and backed up in the cloud. But I am already paying Google monthly for extended Google Drive space. So having to pay twice (on a recurring basis) is simply a rip-off. 

Good that I still have the files.

And guess what - I still keep buying files - in a form of CD audiobooks, which are CD-ROMs with mp3 files recorded. I back them up, transfer to my watch and other player devices if needed. They feel physical and I feel I own them.

Departing from the concept of files was initially the key theme behind iOS: there were applications and they had their own sandboxed data, which could be shared with other applications. But after many years of pushing that concept Apple gave up and introduced the Files app, which really changed the way people (especially power users) use iOS.

It seems we are still not ready to give up on the concept of files. And maybe we never will. Converting a file to "data" is tempting in many occasions, but then it appears you should keep the files too. Just in case you may need it...