If the game is not on steam or gog then you have to buy cd.

Quite a few award winning triple A titles are not available digitally.

Is iTunes a music rental service? I thought you can download the files and hold on to them forever?

You might be right. I always thought it had DRM, though.

DRM isn't an issue in music anymore. But I think if you do pay for digital downloads, you should only pay for lossless files only, like on Bandcamp. To pay for lossy files seems like a waste of money.

I do. The once every 3-4 years one of the artists I like make a new album. Why? It's the *same* price for the physical medium (including download, usually) as it is for just the download.

Sometimes, where some games are not sold anymore or lock by regional restriction.
However they are usually not updated to the latest version so I have to download the superior digital version from "certain places"

Then there are console exclusive where I have to buy the console CD when I had no console, then play the emulated version. I almost bought Grandia at a time and luckily GoG release it recently

I remember when I bought my first CD in the 80s and they were being advertised as "lasting a life-time". How wrong they were.

I'm looking to find a home for my CD collection as I don't listen to them. I barely listen to mp3s these days and generally load YouTube playlists.
Regional restrictions are easily circumvented without visiting "certain places". I like devs (can't remember the one off-hand) who say if our game is regionally restricted from your area, feel free to pirate it. That is sharing the love :)

The "certain places" I meant is the place I had to ask the pirates for help because the CD I bought does not have the game at the latest version. I am not sure all devs give consent like that so I had to buy the old CD, even old game cartridge to play with the peace of mind.

Heh that reminds me of all the game cracks I used to use on games I had purchased because of crap like instrusive DRM or just for the fact that running a game from CD/DVD slows the bugger down and eventually CDs/DVDs stop working.

Exactly.

I'm away to buy a near 100 yr old Gramophone today. Now THAT is a product. :D

CDs aren't so bad, but DVDs and Bluray are rather evil. You either need a separate driver per region or to download some technically illegal software just to play the discs you've legally bought.

What's worse is that I've got movies in English, German and Mandarin and that necessitates either shelling out for software or several different DVD drives and players just to get the things to read.

At least with FLAC, you don't see that kind of silliness.

As much as I can yes - I've had to many external HDDs die on me to trust solely on MP3 tracks. If I'm going to have to back them up to a CD anyway, I might as well buy the CD version from Amazon and get the 'Autorip' MP3 download as well.

People still buy physical media because the hype about MP3 replacing other formats was... well hype.
I found DRM in Google Play tracks recently - which was a shock.

I recommend Crashplan and a utility to check the integrity of the files. I realize you probably have a cap, but uploading a bit over the course of several months would provide a huge amount of protection against that.