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!
I have a 50 terabyte NAS for storing my movies and TV shows. And access it from any of the TVs in my house.
For music…I have a music streaming subscription for convenience, but also have some vinyl records for the small-ish number of albums I want to keep forever.
CDs are fantastic if you have the space for them
I much prefer physical books, and have quite a big library. But most of my textbooks would be either hard or outright impossible to get in paper, so they go onto my e-reader as DRMless pdf and djvu files.
As for movies and music - I don’t see much appeal in physical, since there is no difference in experience between playing from a CD/DVD or from my drive. I still keep my DVDs from childhood, but no longer have any device that can play them (removed the CD drive from the old laptop a while ago). However, I would never rely on streaming like you mentioned either. Only local, DRMless collection. Streaming is just for discovery.
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.
