Ever since I got my Michael Jackson Thriller CD, I’ve been thinking, I have started to prefer physical releases more when it comes to films and music, because it’s nice to have something you own in your hands, lend to a neighbour, and rip to your devices.
With streaming, I’ve cut off some services as I got tieed with the price hikes and removals of specific titles, sure, your music might be lost if you lose your phone and you can just resign in with your account on say, Spotify.
But even those have issues where they can remove the track, with CDs and Blu Ray, it ain’t going away if you keep looking after it.
What are your thoughts on this? Are you big into streaming due to convenience, or do you go physical? Or maybe a bit of both?
Let me know in yer comments!
The biggest problem I have with physical media nowadays is that the players are slowly getting enshitified
You can’t buy a tape deck anymore you can hardly find a reasonable quality record player that’s not audiophile level.
There’s very little choice in DVD / Blu-ray players now. I don’t expect that media to be easy to maintain forever so drm free digital is a much better choice.
Thrift stores are your friend for bluray and dvd players.
Tape Decks can be aquired there too, but are a bit more prone to damage in the components.
I’m an old fart, and the minute I can digitize something, I do it. I’ve had thousands of 45s, LPs, CDs, etc, over the years, but most have gone by the wayside.
I still buy physical media, often at gigs, or online, but once it’s ripped it collects dust, seldom to be handled again.
About a year ago, I started buying DVD’s from thrift stores. I rip them all and put them on my Plex server. I recently aquired a Bluray player and starting to collect those too. Since those take up MUCH more diskspace, I only watch bluray with the physical disk (storage in Europe is unfortunately more expensive than in the USA)
I also started collecting CD’s again (mostly from thrift stores too). I rip these to FLAC and also put them on my Plex.
The beauty of this system for me is that I still have to physically flip through stuff to build my collection. Since it takes up physical space, I limit myself to stuff I actually really want to see/listen to. But by digitizing it, I have the advantage of having acces to that curated content everywhere. The added timesink of ripping and metadata correcting gives me more satisfaction and appreciation for what I bought. A sense of pride and accomplishment, if you will.
So I buy Physical to make sure the collection stays curated and manageable, but digitize most of it for the convenience.
Due to the appreciation of my collection, I now watch more movies and listen to more music than when I had acces to netflix or Spotify.
I try very hard to buy everything on physical media. I subscribe to a few streaming services, but I never buy non-physical media. You don’t really own anything that can suddenly disappear because a company changes policies, get bought, or goes out of business.
Everything I buy is then ripped and stored on my local media server. That makes them more convenient and allows me to store the physical media out of the way. If something goes wrong, I can always re-rip.
It is worth noting that optical discs age and can become unreadable over time. If that happens, I can always go in the opposite direction and burn a new disc from my digital copy.
I’ve recently been buying a lot of blu rays and mp3’s so I own the media I like. I used to steam a lot with Spotify and Netflix and was very happy for a long time. Then Netflix did that password sharing garbage and I started just finding my shows online. I hate that there are so many streaming platforms as well so I would have to chase the movies I love to watch them again, because they would constantly get moved to different platforms. Then a few years ago I bought a used blu ray player and started picking up my favorite’s. The quality is fantastic and I don’t have to wait for buffering. Best part is whenever I want to watch again I can just pop it back in the player and it doesn’t cost me any more money than I did to watch it before.
The streaming age started out great, but I think physical media could make a serious comeback. Not like I care if it does come back though. I would rather keep getting my blu rays for a few bucks on eBay. I would hate if blu rays became like the retro gaming market where the price of old games can skyrocket
