Reading JOEL ELIPHANT's piece in PITCHFORK about the confusing and conflicting meanings of various music formats, I'm reminded of the one thing that connects every format ever devised, from wax cylinders to MP3s, except for streaming. Permanence. Which is not the same thing as ownership. Ownership, in and of itself, is impermanent. We lose things. We trade and sell things. We throw things away. But the music on the thing still remains -- the way we heard a song the first time, the way we still want to hear it. DRAKE may remix "HOTLINE BLING" till the end of time, but we listeners get to choose and preserve the mix, or mixes, that matter most to us. It's up to us, not him. And once we've chosen, no one, not even DRAKE, can take that way from us. Except in the streaming world, where he might decide to make a new version 10 years from now and withdraw streaming rights for everything that came before. Or where his record company or publisher may decide to withhold any number of versions and allow us to listen only to any number of others. I don't want to give them that choice any more than I want to give MARK ROTHKO the choice to rise from the grave and change all his rectangles to circles. He's already put those rectangles out into the world and they are no longer his to take back. They are mine because I have seen them, just like "HOTLINE BLING" is mine because I have heard it... TUMBLR TUESDAY: Sad Songs Catalogued by Theme... CARLY FIORINA JEPSEN... The Art of ALADDIN SANE... An Invisible Conversation Between Hip-Hop and Art Before the 16th Century.