Almost nobody cares about the ultimate quality of the media. Most mixes sound like absolute shit anyway, CD or otherwise. Some buy vinyl but Vinyl is 99/100 times just shit mixes on vinyl. And how many people buying vinyl own a *good* turntable and hifi system?

Few notice the degraded quality of various streaming codecs and some Bluetooth devices. They like convenience and the cost.

I don’t love streaming or whatever but I also don’t like buying something that’ll just become inevitable household detritus. Buy a CD or vinyl just to end up ripping the mp3 / downloading it myself and never use the media again.

As for copy prevention on USB drives, I think most artists have bigger shit to worry about. If ONLY I could give some stranger a usb and they’d share my tunes with 100,000 of their closest friends. The last label release I did they tried to dmca people sharing it online and ultimately didn’t make one but of difference in the end, and would have been better if we really got that kind of attention instead of falling into obscurity.