Streaming vs Physical Media
In January I wrote how I'm fully vested in the streaming lifestyle. While my focus in that post was Spotify and music, it also applies to movies too. I think the last Blu-Ray purchased was The Grand Budapest Hotel or something? We don't even own a Blu-Ray player nowadays.
I'm making a tradeoff here for convenience vs availability.
Chad Comello has a piece about why he's still flying the physical media flag. And he makes that very point about availability. What do you do if the rug is pulled out from under you? Streaming services could wither on the vine. Studios and record companies could change their licensing deals. Movies and albums can just disappear.
I already run into this from time to time with Spotify. If a band has had a lengthy career they're likely to have been on a few different record labels. Not all labels have licensed their work to streaming services. That gap in a body of work is a legit problem. I'm looking at you Killing Joke.
But the convenience of having almost everything at my fingertips keeps that lure of streaming services alive. At least for now.
I commented on Chad's piece about the other elephant in the room.
Reintroducing physical media would mean a complete rethink of our lifestyle. We downsized, and because we were over a decade into the digital lifestyle all those old CDs and DVDs were donated. There would need to be a rethink of where this new media would live. And the non-trivial outlay of acquiring all the equipment to play said media again.
Dear reader, before you keel over horrified, I do still have my vinyl in storage. I'm not some animal.
Also the irony of me saying all of the above when I've just started buying physical books again is not lost on me. What can I tell you, It's complicated.
One of the issues we've seen is what happens when your ISP goes down? Ours did for several hours and we had zero entertainment. No music, no TV, no movies, no apps, nothing. Wait! We still had Blu-rays and our player. That's why I still do it. But we like to make sure our physical media always comes with digital copies. If not or if they expired and won't be fulfilled, we wait until there's a good deal on digital only copies through Vudu or some such. But I staunchly refuse to pay more than $5 for a digital only copy. Maybe I'm cheap
It's a good point about what do you do without an internet connection. Thankfully (I'd I've likely just jinxed the hell out of it) our ISP is pretty reliable. And still, no internet is what reading books are for!
Hedging my bets, we still buy CDs and vinyl but also love the convenience of Apple Music. I spent a lot of money on this audio gear, but my kids don't care and just listen on their phones.
Yeah, it would be nice in a perfect world to re-buy all the fancy lad stereo gear again. But there are so many other things on the shopping list ahead of that. What can I tell you, all my hobbies are expensive.
For music, anything I really like, I absolutely make sure I own some kind of physical version. That could be CD, then ripped and uploaded to the "Uploads" section of YouTube Music, or a download via a Bandcamp purchase. Other music, I will rent, but over time, I've ripped the vast majority of my CDs with a big iTunes library sitting on my NAS, as well as copies on the aforementioned YouTube Music uploads section.
Where this really comes in most usefully for is for film soundtrack albums based around compilations of music. These are always dropping random tracks all the time. A good test case is Drive from 2011. On Spotify track #2 is unavailable. On YouTube Music, tracks #1-5 are unavailable. On Amazon Music, the same tracks #1-5 are missing. My CD rip stored in the uploads section of YouTube Music is complete.
Smaller artists you find in places like Bandcamp do not always make it to Spotify et al either.
As for films? There's no way I could survive without DVDs, Blu Rays and now even a few 4K Blu Rays. Anything earlier than about 2005 is probably a 50:50 shot of being available anywhere. Go back each decade, the and numbers dwindle massively. No TCM section of Max for us in the UK either. I have at last count 30 binders of 25-30 discs each of movies and TV that have been "de-cased" and a few hundred more awaiting suitable shelf space. Yes, it takes up room, but so few older films are even available to buy on Apple or Amazon digitally, it's the only way.
In due course, they will end up ripped on my Plex server (or similar), but that's a very long term project!
Yeah, my workflow obviously not for everyone. Streaming was "good enough" to support our goal of downsizing and thus selling/donating media that (to be honest) was just sitting on a bookshelf collecting dust.
The rub will be if/when missing cloud media becomes annoying enough to throw money at the problem and re-buy audio/visual gear. We've been in this house five years now, so far there's been no table flip moment. Yet.