Some of my comments from a discussion about credit card-form factor cards that serve only to carry PINs, seguing into comments about compact discs:
… those cards are degenerate, and retain the card form factor as an icon of value more than anything else.Really, N. is just buying an authorization number she passes to the company when she buys a recharge card. I have a supermarket club card somewhere, but I never use it because the swipe machine lets me punch in my phone number in lieu of a card.
Cards like that are just tchotchkes for consumers* who conflate value and physicality, just as compact discs are tchotchkes for music distribution companies who conflate security and physicality, and who need to prop up an old-fashioned physicality-based distribution chain. (I still buy CDs, but I don’t listen to them — I upload the data to my server and distribute it to my listening devices from there, and then store the CDs as proof of ownership.)
You are, I believe, ahead of the curve here.
Ahead of one, and far behind another — the millions of people who dispense with tchotchkes and download music, even if the distributors aren’t smart enough to serve them properly.