Physical Media Makes Art Harder to Erase

Tom Rizzuto’s case for physical media turns on an object that was never supposed to be a record: “bone music,” the bootleg recordings made in the Soviet Union by cutting sound grooves into discarded X-ray plates. The image he uses is part of the point: a translucent disc with the original medical image still visible, music literally pressed onto the image of a body.

Rizzuto describes bone music as both a historical curiosity and a symbol of defiance against Soviet censorship. American jazz and rock and roll were restricted so tightly, he says, that in many cases citizens were not allowed to own or listen to them. Young people who wanted the music badly enough found a workaround. They copied American records onto X-rays, creating objects that “looked awesome” even if they “didn’t sound so good.”

The point is not only that the records existed. It is that they could be owned, passed around and preserved outside the control of the institutions trying to suppress them. For Rizzuto, bone music matters now because streaming has changed not just how media is delivered, but how secure access to media really is.

He does not frame streaming as a mistake. He says the streaming revolution brought “so many wonderful things” into daily life: music from anywhere, in any genre, instantly available on a phone. He streams movies, podcasts and television, and notes that he is “making a piece of streaming media” while making the argument. The issue is not whether streaming is useful. The issue is whether a culture built primarily around streaming has confused availability with permanence.

Physical media, in Tom Rizzuto’s formulation, “keeps the promise of permanence in a way that streaming simply cannot.” CDs, DVDs, cassettes, VHS tapes and other physical formats are harder to erase because they are distributed into many hands. Once copies circulate physically, removal becomes a material problem rather than a platform decision.

That claim matters in his Soviet example because access to music was also a question of control. Rizzuto says American music inspired young Soviet listeners and helped them imagine changes they wanted in their own society. He is careful to include “many other very important things” in that history, but says people came to argue that American music was one factor in shaping those imaginations around the fall of the Berlin Wall. The image accompanying that point is concrete: a graffiti-covered Berlin Wall beside people climbing and sitting on top of it.

His counterfactual is deliberately simple: if all media had been streaming then, access could have been shut off. The government, or another controlling institution, would not have needed to seize every object. It could have blocked the channel.

Rizzuto applies that concern to the present media environment, where “so few actual people” have control over large media conglomerates and can remove works from streaming instantly. He poses several possible explanations for why media disappears: control, concealment, censorship, or messages someone does not want heard. He does not claim every removal is censorship. His point is that the infrastructure makes all of those possibilities easier.

This is where the nostalgia becomes secondary. Rizzuto admits he misses the old rituals of physical media: going out to find something, acquiring it, keeping it in a collection, showing it to friends. But he separates that feeling from the preservation argument. The sentimental value of a shelf is not the core claim. The core claim is that ownership disperses power.

The 1922 silent horror classic “Nosferatu,” directed by F. W. Murnau, gives Tom Rizzuto a second example of why physical copies matter. The on-screen material identifies the film and shows the vampire figure in a doorway, with a stylized film strip image beside it.

According to Rizzuto, film historians consider “Nosferatu” a work that changed how scary movies were thought about. But the film also came close to disappearing. He says historians describe it as having “pretty conclusively ripped off” Bram Stoker’s “Dracula.” The Stoker family sued the production and won. As part of the court decision, every copy of “Nosferatu” was supposed to be destroyed.

That did not happen. “Obviously, they missed a few,” Rizzuto says. Because they missed a few, the film remains available to interpret.

The example sharpens the preservation argument because the attempted destruction was not theoretical. There was a legal decision requiring the eradication of the work. What saved it, in Rizzuto’s telling, was the practical difficulty of finding and destroying every physical copy. Mass production, which can look disposable in one context, becomes protective in another. The more widely a physical work circulates, the harder it is to make disappear completely.

Rizzuto does not insist that “Nosferatu” is as important to world history as rock and roll was for Soviet listeners. He explicitly says it may not be, or maybe it is; he does not claim the authority to decide. What matters is that the work still exists for future interpretation. There may be meanings in it “that we have yet to interpret,” and preservation keeps that possibility open.

Tom Rizzuto names several streaming-era concerns that he does not develop: fair compensation for artists and creators, the financial sustainability of companies and conglomerates, and the way algorithms can repeatedly feed audiences “the same stuff over and over again.” He also says it is important to amplify voices from traditionally marginalized groups. These are presented as real issues, but not the specific focus of his case.

His focus is narrower: art should not exist only in systems where a small number of gatekeepers can make it unavailable. Books, movies, television, podcasts and music are powerful, he says, because they help people imagine the world “the way that it should be, rather than the way that it is.” The collage of obsolete media he shows — a CD or DVD, MiniDV cassette, audio cassette and VHS tape — makes the preservation claim concrete. These formats may look technologically superseded, but Rizzuto treats them as vessels that kept works in circulation because they could be held, stored, copied, lent and rediscovered.

He does not propose abolishing streaming. He says plainly that “we’re not going to get rid of streaming media” and “we should not get rid of streaming media.” Streaming is “an awesome thing.” But he rejects a media world in which a few people have unilateral power to remove “so many pieces of potentially important art.”

Nor does he pretend to have a clean implementation plan. Preservation might require cooperation between media companies and creators. It might also require something more informal or underground, analogous to bone music in the Soviet Union. Rizzuto’s final position is less a policy prescription than a priority: physical media should remain part of the media world because it gives art a kind of durability streaming does not provide.