Need is defined as much by what's economical. Do we NEED flac files instead of 320kbit mp3's ? many people can't tell the difference, it's certainly "good enough" (tm), it's just that, at some point, it makes no economical difference, and then there's just no reason anymore to use a lossy format.

That's not necessarily the reason people choose FLAC. Some people, myself included, simply feel it's "wrong" to throw data away. Remember you might need that data later for re-encoding or otherwise changing the audio.

I partially agree, I think everyone in principle feels it's wrong to throw data away, if there are absolutely no compromises to be had.

"Hey, there are these two copies of a song, one was digitally filtered and does not contain all the detail, maybe you can't hear the difference, they're same price/speed/storage which one do you take?" Everyone takes the lossless.

Start introducing different cost (in download speed, storage space, whatever) and peoples choices start diverging.

But as the cost fall and become more identical between lossy and lossless, people will be more partial to lossless on principle alone.

Give it 10-20 years, there will be head-fi streaming services offering lossless movie streaming.

We do not have flacs or 320kbps mp3s. We have crappy 158kbps webm (youtube) which has the same audio quality like an 64 kbps mp3.

I believe that AVIF and JPEGXL are going to be the last "traditional codecs".

But there had been good research on using neural nets for compression and decompression, and I expect the next codec to have massive improvements over these formats.

Why not ? why do we have to watch crap even when the impact is so low ?