Physical Media

CDs, vinyl records, DVDs, VHS tapes, video games. Blockbuster, Best Buy, your local video store.

I miss physical media. I don't personally want to own items of each format I listed above; I have long stopped owning CDs in favor of vinyl (hopefully with an accompanying digital download) or purchases from Bandcamp. I'm moreso talking about the industry and culture of physical media, of collections that can be made unique or rare, tangible, not on-demand.

Music streaming has made listening to music as a whole more accessible to the globe. You can listen to almost every piece of music from anywhere on your preferred streaming service. Small artists like myself can reach audiences easier than ever before. But what has streaming caused us to miss out on?

• Deluxe editions and bonus tracks: There's no point to calling anything a bonus track when it is readily available on Spotify under the "deluxe" release which sits directly next to the "standard" release in that artist's discography.
• Region-specific tracks: I remember scouring the internet - legally, of couse - for the Japan-exclusive songs from Less Than Jake, Zebrahead, and the like. Now what tends to happen is an album from one of your favorite bands can suddenly be "unavailable in your country" on streaming even when it was previously in your library, playable.
• Ownership: You don't have to look far to see why digital ownership sucks.

I mentioned being able to find "almost every piece of music" online because there's a benefit of having collected my music library my entire life in a series of hard drives and cloud providers: I have entire discographies from bands that no longer exist (or existed before streaming was readily available) where you can't find their music anywhere save a YouTube video or two. I cherish this collection and freedom to own my music without limits.

I'm not a movie person which means DVDs and such don't apply to me, but I enjoyed listening to this episode of Changelog where they go into more detail about why physical media matters in the movie industry.