In Paste Magazine’s “Witnessing pop music’s iTunes renaissance”, Cassidy Sollazzo talks about stumbling upon the extant iTunes Store within Apple Music, and how strange it is that this “relic of a bygone digital download era still exists in a little hidden pocket of a streaming giant.”

Let me ask you this: can there be a renaissance of something if it never died?

As a KaZaA Millennial, I’ve been maintaining my digital music collection for basically as long as that was possible to do. Burning my CDs, downloading music files, organizing them in iTunes and now Apple Music (the app, not the streaming service), and syncing them with my iPod and now iPhone has been my routine for literal decades now. This post’s headline isn’t quite accurate since the iTunes we knew doesn’t really exist anymore (as the article explains). But its spirit and purpose live on in Apple Music, which serves as a storehouse for digital music files that exist independently from streaming services.

The primacy of files has been a core tenet in how I use technology. Simply following an artist on Spotify or buying a digital version of a movie doesn’t really mean anything; if you don’t have the actual files on your device then you don’t own it—you’re a glorified renter with no recourse when the studio or global conglomerate inevitably decides to remove access to it. The MP3s I’ve accumulated for the majority of my life don’t go anywhere when companies get bought or services shut down or Terms & Conditions change without me knowing. They sit comfortably in my digital library (backed up on external hard drives) just waiting to be listened to.

The same principle extends to why I have DVDs, Blu-rays, print books, vinyls, typewriters… It’s an exquisite feeling to fire them up and realize no AI or algorithm or advertiser knows what I’m doing with them. I’m just free to listen and watch and read.