You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day.

I'm your host, Elise Hume.

We have never had more access to music, movies, and media, and yet we've never been so close to losing it all.

And in the world that we live in today, where so few actual people have so much

control over these big media conglomerates and have the power to take things off of streaming

instantly, I think we have to ask ourselves, why would they do that? Is it a control thing? Are

they hiding something from us?

Is it censorship?

That's music professor Tom Rizuto.

In this talk, he traces a line from Cold War Soviet teenagers bootlegging jazz onto discarded

X-ray plates all the way to the streaming platforms we use every day.

His argument isn't anti-streaming or digital technology.

It's pro-permanent physical record.

Physical media keeps the promise of permanence in a way that streaming simply cannot.

That's coming up right after a short break.

And now our TED Talk of the Day.

Bone music is a relic of a very interesting time in world history, a time when the governments of the Soviet

Union restricted access to American music like jazz and rock and roll so tightly that in many

cases they wouldn't even let their citizens own or listen to this music. Now, the young people of the

Soviet Union wanted to hear this music so badly,

that they figured out that they could actually bootleg American records

by cutting sound grooves into discarded x-ray plates,

...