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!
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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.
I own physical copies of whatever I can. And I have a Jellyfin server that hosts all my media. Owning it yourself rather than renting it from a corpo is the way to go.
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 probably bought 500 discs when Blockbuster went under. And they’re still in an okay market for players they’re not gone yet, but at some point they will go the way of the dodo
Nowadays I buy digital music (mostly via Bandcamp but there’s also HDTracks, Qobuz, etc.) & play the music that way. Can also stream my own music library if I want via Jellyfin or other applications.
re: physical CDs, yes I’ve got a ton of those too from before you could buy digital music but have already ripped them. Haven’t had a need to touch the physical discs in years but still keep them in CD binders just in case.
Also not sure if it matters but for me I’m always living in small apartments/rooms so I absolutely avoid collecting physical items, there’s just no space for that.
Physical media can have certain bonuses that digital content cant/wont. Album art, bonus features, easter eggs, etc, but also the analog sound of vinyl.
The main thing I see these days though, is that the content cant be edited, censored, or modified in any way. Locally owned digital content also benefits from this.
CDs are fantastic if you have the space for them
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 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.
