Some of you running across this site may be wondering why on earth anyone would ever go back to buying physical media, which can sometimes be expensive, over paying the smaller monthly fees of a streaming service. It’s true that with that small fee, you gain access to a lot more content than you would paying the same amount every month for physical media. However, do you really need access to all that content? Is having access to a huge library really worth the trade-off of often still dealing with mid-roll ads, not owning that content, and having it yanked away from you as soon as you stop paying the subscription fee?
Ownership and longevity go hand-in-hand
When you pay a streaming service, you don’t really own any of the content in the library you just paid for. Not only that, but streaming services reserve the right to change which content is in the library, or is available in certain regions. This is sometimes not the services’ fault, they own a limited license to the content that can be revoked or expire and then they have to remove that content from their library. However, if we really owned that content in a physical form, nobody can really take that away from us.
Have you ever subscribed to a streaming service that has a show that you love? Then after a while that show disappears from the catalog, but you find out that another streaming service has it now. I’ve seen this happen to many of my favorite shows and sometimes it’s caused me to subscribe to yet another service just to be able to watch it again. I’ve noticed that TV networks that used to license their shows to existing services have been creating their own services and moving all of their shows over to the new service after the license expires. You can take Peacock as an example. Many NBC shows were available on Hulu before NBC created Peacock and moved everything, forcing people to buy another subscription.
This kind of thing happens all too often and it’s getting to a point where you could be buying physical media for the same amount of money or less than having multiple different subscriptions. With so many monthly subscriptions, it’s getting easier and easier to justify cancelling them all and just buying physical so that you can own it forever.
Physical media allows more intentional consumption
I think the large catalogs presented to us can be a bad thing. Sure, it’s a marvel of technology to be able to go online, any time, anywhere and be able to watch just about anything you want, provided you subscribe to the right streaming service. However, there’s been an ongoing problem in society of diminishing attention spans and inability to concentrate. This, of course, isn’t as simple as streaming services being the problem, but I think they create a meaningful contribution along with social media and other factors.
These days we’re much less intentional about the shows we watch and the music we listen to. Some of us might have a show going at all times, creating an inability to sit and be alone with just our thoughts. I think there’s a better way of consuming media that society has basically forgotten about. We’ve forgotten a time when we had a limited physical library or even had to wait for a particular show or movie to be airing. We had to be more intentional about the shows we watched and the music we listened to, which, I’d argue, allowed us to enjoy it more.
Turning our attention to the shows and movies themselves, they’ve seemingly decreased in quality over the years. The producers no longer need to get you to buy a movie ticket or a physical DVD, they just need you to have the subscription, which has proven to be a lot easier to get you to purchase. So now, the streaming companies like Netflix have started dabbling in film production and most of the time, they’re really bad at it. I’ll grant a few gems here and there, but I do think that they have less on the line now than ever before.
Re-watchers delight
Do you have that one show that you watch over and over again? Maybe it’s multiple shows that you cycle through with a new show thrown into the mix here and there. For me, I like to go back to The Office, Psych, South Park, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and probably a couple others I’m forgetting about. I really like to re-watch shows. Sometimes it’s just because I really like the show, but there’s also some ability to throw it on the background while I’m doing something mindless. I’ve already seen it a bunch of times, so I’m not really missing anything by being distracted while I’m watching. Yes, I know this is a little bit contrary to my point about intentionally consuming media.
If you’re like me and re-watch a few shows a lot, it makes perfect sense to buy those shows in their physical format so that you don’t have to maintain a subscription. It might even make more sense financially to spend the money upfront and only buy a subscription if there is something new that you really want to see and it’s only available behind that paywall. Turning our attention to music for a minute, if you’re unlike a lot of people these days and listen to a selection of albums and artists rather than the barrage of options thrown at you by Spotify or Apple Music, you should buy that music on CD. That brings us perfectly into our next topic, supporting the creators.
Supporting the creators by buying physical
Unfortunately, the convenience of streaming services that cater to a more indie crowd of creators and artists (thinking more along the lines of music streaming services) comes at more of a cost than just the monthly fee users pay. Often these services aren’t paying out as much money to artists than if the artists sold solely physical media (and streaming didn’t exist so it was the only option to purchase).
In cases for smaller artists getting less than 1000 streams per song, Spotify is toying with the idea of no royalties. I think that artists should be incentivized to continue producing physical music and/or selling mp3s by increasing the number of people buying these formats. Spotify needs to be incentivized to pay their artists and what better way than giving artists a viable way to get out from underneath Spotify’s thumb. If none of my other points about buying media directly from the creators in physical form are hitting home, let this be the point that lands. Small creators are being unfairly treated and they need a way out. They need you to give them another option.
Conclusion
Buy physical media! It’s a great way of actually owning assets you’ve paid for and it can be a fun hobby. Not only that, but it’s a better way of supporting the creators you love. I’m getting concerned by this landscape and I want to keep artists incentivized to produce physical mediums of their work. I’m starting to notice some artists not even bother with CDs and I don’t want to let that become the norm.
Keep following my work if you’re interested in physical media. I plan on writing about my adventures with it and giving you, my audience, great resources for building your library and not having to settle with sub-par accessibility that physical mediums are sometimes attributed with.
