From one perspective, the cloud-centered culture that predominates now takes this principle even further. Yet it comes to us in a form at odds with ownership. The music we stream — and, in some cases, provisionally download — from Spotify, Beats Music and similar ventures, as well as what we access on YouTube, never belongs to us the way that the music we manually load onto our computers did. No matter how many playlists we construct, no matter how many of our friends to subscribe to them, we are still working with borrowed materials. They belong to a library, but not our library.

As I read this, it occurred to me that for most of musical history, music wasn't something that you owned. Unless you could play the piece, you couldn't take it with you, and to the extent you could, it was only a fragmented interpretation. In middle and high school, I spent a significant amount of time making mix tapes, which I listened to while moving about. There was an art to these mix tapes, they captured a time and a place, and we shared our best among friends.

When I listen to music now, I often don't know when it was created. I don't have much urge to. I look at my collection of CDs and know that their date with the trash heap is coming. My iTunes collection is a garbled mess of untitled tracks and local and cloud-based storage.

I still have the urge to build a musical library, but I don't want it tethered, and that seems to be impossible. I have given up trying.