Over the course of more than a decade, physical media has gradually vanished from public view. Once computers had an optical drive except for ultrabooks, but these days computer cases that even support an internal optical drive are rare. Rather than manuals and drivers included on a data CD you now get a QR code for an online download. In the home, DVD and Blu-ray (BD) players have given way to smart TVs with integrated content streaming apps for various services. Music and kin are enjoyed via smart speakers and smart phones that stream audio content from online services. Even books are now commonly read on screens rather than printed on paper.
With these changes, stores selling physical media have mostly shuttered, with much audiovisual and software content no longer pressed on discs or printed. This situation might lead one to believe that the end of physical media is nigh, but the contradiction here comes in the form of a strong revival of primarily what used to be considered firmly obsolete physical media formats. While CD, DVD and BD sales are plummeting off a cliff, vinyl records, cassette tapes and even media like 8-track tapes are undergoing a resurgence, in a process that feels hard to explain.
How big is this revival, truly? Are people tired of digital restrictions management (DRM), high service fees and/or content in their playlists getting vanished or altered? Perhaps it is out of a sense of (faux) nostalgia?
A Deserved End
Ask anyone who ever has had to use any type of physical media and they’ll be able to provide a list of issues with various types of physical media. Vinyl always was cumbersome, with clicking and popping from dust in the grooves, and gradual degradation of the record with a lifespan in the hundreds of plays. Audio cassettes were similar, with especially Type I cassettes having a lot of background hiss that the best Dolby noise reduction (NR) systems like Dolby B, C and S only managed to tame to a certain extent.
Add to this issues like wow and flutter, and the joy of having a sticky capstan roller resulting in tape spaghetti when you open the tape deck, ruining that precious tape that you had only recently bought. These issues made CDs an obvious improvement over both audio formats, as they were fully digital and didn’t wear out from merely playing them hundreds of times.
Although audio CDs are better in many ways, they do not lend themselves to portability very well unlike tape, with anti-shock read buffers being an absolute necessity to make portable CD players at all feasible. This same issue made data CDs equally fraught with issues, especially if you went into the business of writing your own (data or audio) CDs on CD-Rs. Burning coasters was exceedingly common for years. Yet the alternative was floppies – with LS-120 and Zip disks never really gaining much market share – or early Flash memory, whether USB sticks (MB-sized) or those inside MP3 players and early digital cameras. There were no good options, but we muddled on.
On the video side VHS had truly brought the theater into the home, even if it was at fuzzy NTSC or PAL quality with astounding color bleed and other artefacts. Much like audio cassette tapes, here too the tape would gradually wear out, with the analog video signal ensuring that making copies would result in an inferior copy.
Rewinding VHS tapes was the eternal curse, especially when popping in that tape from the rental store and finding that the previous person had neither been kind, nor rewound. Even if being able to record TV shows to watch later was an absolute game changer, you better hope that you managed to appease the VHS gods and had it start at the right time.
It could be argued that DVDs were mostly perfect aside from a lack of recording functionality by default and pressed DVDs featuring unskippable trailers and similar nonsense. One can also easily argue here that DVDs’ success was mostly due to its DRM getting cracked early on when the CSS master key leaked. DVDs would also introduce region codes that made this format less universal than VHS and made things like snapping up a movie during an overseas vacation effectively impossible.
This was a practice that BDs doubled-down on, and with the encryption still intact to this day, it means that unlike with DVDs you must pay to be allowed to watch BDs which you previously bought, whether this cost is included in the dedicated BD player, or the license cost for a BD video player for on the PC.
Thus, when streaming services gave access to a very large library for a (small) monthly fee, and cloud storage providers popped up everywhere, it seemed like a no-brainer. It was like paying to have the world’s largest rental store next door to your house, or a data storage center for all your data. All you had to do was create an account, whip out the credit card and no more worries.
Combined with increasingly faster and ubiquitous internet connections, the age of physical media seemed to have come to its natural end.
The Revival
Despite this perfect landscape where all content is available all the time via online services through your smart speakers, smart TVs, smart phones and so on, the number of vinyl record sales has surged the past years despite its reported death in the early 2000s. In 2024 the vinyl records market grew another few percent, with more and more new record pressing plants coming online. In addition to vinyl sales, UK cassette sales also climbed, hitting 136,000 in 2023. CD sales meanwhile have kept plummeting, but not as strongly any more.
Perhaps the most interesting part is that most of newly released vinyl are new albums, by artists like Taylor Swift, yet even the classics like Pink Floyd and Fleetwood Mac keep selling. As for the ‘why’, some suggest that it’s the social and physical experience of physical media and the associated interactions that is a driving factor. In this sense it’s more of a (cultural) statement, as a rejection of the world of digital streaming. The sleeve of a vinyl record also provides a lot of space for art and other creative expressions, all of which provides a collectible value.
Although so far CD sales haven’t really seen a revival, the much lower cost of producing these shiny discs could reinvigorate this market too for many of the same reasons. Who doesn’t remember hanging out with a buddy and reading the booklet of a CD album which they just put into the player after fetching it from their shelves? Maybe checking the lyrics, finding some fun Easter eggs or interesting factoids that the artists put in it, and having a good laugh about it with your buddy.
As some responded when asked, they like the more intimate experience of vinyl records along with having a physical item to own, while streaming music is fine for background music. The added value of physical media here is thus less about sound quality, and more about a (social) experience and collectibles.
On the video side of the fence there is no such cheerful news, however. In 2024 sales of DVDs, BDs and UHD (4K) BDs dropped by 23.4% year-over-year to below $1B in the US. This compares with a $16B market value in 2005, underlining a collapsing market amidst brick & mortar stores either entirely removing their DVD & BD section, or massively downsizing it. Recently Sony also announced the cessation of its recordable BD, MD and MiniDV media, as a further indication of where the market is heading.
Despite streaming services repeatedly bifurcating themselves and their libraries, raising prices and constantly pulling series and movies, this does not seem to hurt their revenue much, if at all. This is true for both audiovisual services like Netflix, but also for audio streaming services like Spotify, who are seeing increasing demand (per Billboard), even as digital track sales are seeing a pretty big drop year-over-year (-17.9% for Week 16 of 2025).
Perhaps this latter statistic is indicative that the idea of ‘buying’ a music album or film which – courtesy of DRM – is something that you’re technically only leasing, is falling out of favor. This is also illustrated by the end of Apple’s iPod personal music player in favor of its smart phones that are better suited for streaming music on the go. Meanwhile many series and some movies are only released on certain streaming platforms with no physical media release, which incentivizes people to keep those subscriptions.
To continue the big next-door-rental-store analogy, in 2025 said single rental store has now turned into fifty stores, each carrying a different inventory that gets either shuffled between stores or tossed into a shredder from time to time. Yet one of them will have That New Series™, which makes them a great choice, unless you like more rare and older titles, in which case you get to hunt the dusty shelves over at EBay and kin.
It’s A Personal Thing
Humans aren’t automatons that have to adhere to rigid programming. They have each their own preferences, ideologies and wishes. While for some people the DRM that has crept into the audiovisual world since DVDs, Sony’s MiniDisc (with initial ATRAC requirement), rootkits on audio CDs, and digital music sales continues to be a deal-breaker, others feel no need to own all the music and videos they like and put them on their NAS for local streaming. For some the lower audio quality of Spotify and kin is no concern, much like for those who listened to 64 kbit WMA files in the early 2000s, while for others only FLACs ripped from a CD can begin to appease their tastes.
Reading through the many reports about ‘the physical media’ revival, what jumps out is that on one hand it is about the exclusivity of releasing something on e.g. vinyl, which is also why sites like Bandcamp offer the purchase of a physical album, and mainstream artists more and more often opt for this. This ties into the other noticeable reason, which is the experience around physical media. Not just that of handling the physical album and operating of the playback device, but also that of the offline experience, being able to share the experience with others without any screens or other distractions around. Call it touching grass in a socializing sense.
As I mentioned already in an earlier article on physical media and its purported revival, there is no reason why people cannot enjoy both physical media as well as online streaming. If one considers the rental store analogy, the former (physical media) is much the same as it always was, while online streaming merely replaces the brick & mortar rental store. Except that these new rental stores do not take requests for tapes or DVDs not in inventory and will instead tell you to subscribe to another store or use a VPN, but that’s another can of worms.
So far optical media seems to be still in freefall, and it’s not certain whether it will recover, or even whether there might be incentives in board rooms to not have DVDs and BDs simply die. Here the thought of having countless series and movies forever behind paywalls, with occasional ‘vanishings’ might be reason enough for more people to seek out a physical version they can own, or it may be that the feared erasure of so much media in this digital, DRM age is inevitable.
Running Up That Hill
The ironic thing about this revival is that it seems influenced very much by streaming services, such as with the appearance of a portable cassette player in Netflix’s Stranger Things, not to mention Rocket Raccoon’s original Sony Walkman TPS-L2 in Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy.
After many saw Sony’s original Walkman in the latter movie, there was a sudden surge in EBay searches for this particular Walkman, as well as replicas being produced by the bucket load, including 3D printed variants. This would seem to support the theory that the revival of vinyl and cassette tapes is more about the experiences surrounding these formats, rather than anything inherent to the format itself, never mind the audio quality.
As we’re now well into 2025, we can quite confidently state that vinyl and cassette tape sales will keep growing this year. Whether or not new (and better) cassette mechanisms (with Dolby NR) will begin to be produced again along with Type II tapes remains to be seen, but there seems to be an inkling of hope there. It was also reported that Dolby is licensing new cassette mechanisms for NR, so who knows.
Meanwhile CD sales may stabilize and perhaps even increase again, in the midst of still a very uncertain future optical media in general. Recordable optical media will likely continue its slow death, as in the PC space Flash storage has eaten its lunch and demanded seconds. Even though PCs no longer tend to have 5.25″ bays for optical drives, even a simple Flash thumb drive tends to be faster and more durable than a BD. Here the appeal of ‘cloud storage’ has been reduced after multiple incidents of data loss & leaks in favor of backing up to a local (SSD) drive.
Finally, as old-school physical audio formats experience a revival, there just remains the one question about whether movies and series will soon only be accessible via streaming services, alongside a veritable black market of illicit copies, or whether BD versions of movies and series will remain available for sale. With the way things are going, we may see future releases on VHS, to match the vibe of vinyl and cassette tapes.
In lieu of clear indications from the industry on what direction things will be heading into, any guess is probably valid at this point. The only thing that seems abundantly clear at this point is that physical media had to die first for us to learn to truly appreciate it.
For me, it’s owning a copy of (licensed, I know) media that can’t easily be revoked obsoleted or somehow made useless to me. I’m sick of having to continually pay or lose access.
“I’m sick of having to continually pay or lose access.”
And that is very good reason to have local storage as well as physical media. Sites on the net come and go. On-line content comes and goes. So, best to have what you ‘own’ local … in your hands. Otherwise, like a cell phone, they’ll nickel and dime you to death … keep paying if you want the service/storage/whatever.
Sounds like a strong argument for a NAS. Shame HDDs can be very expensive.
HDD are cheap as hell. You can store ~5700 non compressed CD on a $58 4TB drive. For a CD you’d pay $10, it’s like 1000x cheaper than the CD medium.
HDDs won’t be cheap as hell (or anything else) for much longer, thanks to tariffs. But then, that will apply to a lot of other storage media. I think I’ll learn to play my music & movies in my head. :-)
Where are you getting $58 4TB drives? Asking for erm … a friend lol. I only seem to see them closer to $100 unless they are “refurbished” or used. I recently built a truenas server out of one of those mini pc’s and am in need of more bulk storage.
4 TB for 58 USD is probably a SMR drive with all its shortcomings. Expect to pay 25 USD/TB for a more robust conventional drive – which is still a bargain compared to other media, physical or virtual.
Sure, until that HDD self-destructs for no reason other than industry-wide yet historically and inexcusably faulty USB control code, power management and hardware which allows an HDD to be dropped from the buss, regardless of whether it is engaged in a write operation at the time, just because the system HAD to look for, or “became aware” of another USB device, and so was ABSOLUTELY REQUIRED to drop the user-initiated data-write session, without proper finalazation of the process, DESTROYING the drive’s directories instantly.
And where are you going to get the files to fill it with? Most pirated copies are rips from physical media. Otherwise you’re at the mercy of what was popular enough to be pirated, not what you could got to a store and just buy.
I guess I don’t see internal HDDs as that expensive. 4TB HDDs at New Egg are in the $100 range +-$20. Not bad at all in my mind. Portables aren’t that bad either … 5TB for $114 (just checked).
I do have a file server at home, actually two at the moment. I have a headless Ryzen 2400G powered tower (current server) and a RPI-5 8GB all setup (new server) as I am thinking of moving to the RPI for the primary home file server to save some space in the home office. The RPI-5 system sits on a shelf with a PiDP-10 front panel for display anyway. Both are connected to a UPS for power protection. I don’t do RAID as there is nothing time critical on getting a server restored after a system failure of some sort. If it takes a day or two to restore from a backup, or need to build a new SSD OS drive because it failed, so be it. I just keep good backups of the file server for the eventuality that I hope never happens… BTW, I have lost a drive or two data drives over the years. No biggie. Restore and back to where you were (or close enough). Currently spinning around 2.7TB, so have plenty of breathing room.
Depending on where you live, that 1 TB is closer to 100 for SSD. Id not bother with any storage media utilizing moving parts for anything else than quarterly backups.
CJay my wife and I was just having this very discussion last night. She’s finally realizing why I’ve been against online gaming that have in game purchases, or places where you can buy movies online like fandango. At any moment they could pull the plug and you’ll be S.O.L. with no recourse.
There is really only one answer to that. Arrr!
yep. As the article says ” 2025 said single rental store has now turned into fifty stores, each carrying a different inventory that gets either shuffled between stores” – for a while it was more convenient to pay for a service – now the market has fragmented so much it’s easier to just download a copy and not pay. This is the same mistake the music industry made..
Clouds float across the moon covering your house in darkness. The faint scrape of grit across concrete is the only sound that could give warning before your doors give way to the well placed kick near the latch and flashbangs disorient you. The year is 2033 and your license to Michael Jackson’s 1982 album Thriller has been revoked. The Sony License Enforcement Team streams into your house as you stumble, trying to reorient yourself, before being tackled to the ground. You lay helplessly hogtied on your livingroom floor as you watch them take stacks of CDs from your house and throw them into a mobile shredding truck. The fine glitter of aluminum sparkles as the clouds complete their lunar transit.
That’s why I get my decorating ideas every month from Harder Homes and Gardens.
Absolutely! Not owning it but paying for as it is “sold” to you as if you do is the new screwing over from business. Check out Louis Rossmann’s yt channel for more on this type of marketing ploy.
Would much rather actually own physical media then some ephemeral bit that can be made to vanish at the license holder’s whim.
Or anyone who in the past purchased Sony EBooks and lost their entire library. Or maybe that music collection on Microsoft Zune.
— “…vinyl records, cassette tapes and even media like 8-track tapes are undergoing a resurgence, in a process that feels hard to explain.”
People like concreteness and tactility – I think it’s something primal. Digital files on a drive or in the cloud are convenient – they take up a tiny fraction of the space needed for physical media, and they can often be accessed from anywhere on a whim. But they have no ‘heft’; they can’t be held in the hand nor seen directly, they’re essentially an abstraction.
— “Are people tired of digital restrictions management (DRM), high service fees and/or content in their playlists getting vanished or altered? Perhaps it is out of a sense of (faux) nostalgia?”
I would say ‘Yes’ to all of the above – but that’s in addition to the primalism I mentioned earlier. Also, is their such a thing as “faux nostalgia”? It’s certainly abstract, because it’s an emotion, or a state of mind. But false? I’d say that’s not even wrong – for me it simply doesn’t parse.
For those that move a lot “heft” is the last thing one wants.
Also, in 60 years of handling vinyl, cassette and reel tape (and yes, even CDs) i have damsged maybe 2-3 specimens of of each format thru mishandling or bad storage…
Conversely, I have had MANY HDDs tank themselves over the inherent, inexcusable sloppiness of the overall USB protocols. They drop drives for no reason in mid-write cycle, and there went your entire multi-terabyte collection.
Why are you connecting your hard disk over USB?!
Probably because he hasnt got any other option. Common sense says not to plug in any new devices while using an external drive via usb though.
The fact that’s a thing kind of proves the point. Do you think most non-tech people think that way ? USB was meant to be hot insertable so people expect ALL devices to work that way.
I have never have that happen unto me, and i use computers since childhood. My first PC was 1992 with an Am386-DX40 and my first USB harddrive was, if i remember correctly, somewhere 98-99ish.
I had accidentally dropped one while running (poor 200 GB was so young ;.;), lost some to heat failure, but never ever has an USB drive failed on me because i put some other device into the USB tree.
Maybe Linux is just clever enough to redo the write behind my back when it fails or whatever but yeah.
The tactility point you raise is a key selling point for me.
I still buy, collect and watch LaserDisc movies. For me (and from a technical standpoint, at least on good equipment) it was the peak of physical analog video. I enjoy the process of finding the rare cuts, winning them in action or otherwise landing a deal, receiving them and, in many cases, opening them for the first time. Watching a movie on LaserDisc is a process, and I very much enjoy the ritualistic approach. I have to really think about what I want to watch and commit to. It’s not like Netflix et al where you just “play whatever” and let it run in the background. It’s like a tea ceremony… deliberate and pointed.
I also enjoy the cover art, especially in the case of gatefolds or collectors editions. When studios weren’t constrained to a tiny little box they could make much more engaging and elaborate art.
Yes, Blu-ray is technically superior, but LaserDisc still feels like it has soul. I have many cuts considered “the only real way” to see the film. As example, the LaserDisc of The Matrix was the culmination of all the technical expertise the industry had gathered to that point… and it’s the only way to see it with the original theatrical color timing. It just looks RIGHT, for anyone old enough to have seen it in theaters. Can’t beat the audio tracks, either. I still think Apollo 13’s DTS LaserDisc audio track is unmatched, even by Blu-ray. A lot of care and deliberate mastering choices went into making even the most pedestrian LaserDisc cuts, and almost all of them sound better than their contemporaries.
The best part is I have all the films and classics I care about on a shelf and nobody can take them from me or limit my access to them.
If that’s “faux nostalgia” or even misplaced idealism, so be it.
Until DRM free downloads are the standard, physical media will have to be pried from my cold dead hands.
The standard answer to filling those big, fancy NASs has been “just pirate it”
Well guess what? Most pirated copies come from physical media. Without physical media you’re at the mercy of whatever was popular enough for someone to want to go to the trouble of cracking the DRM on. Or it’s up to you to crack the DRM yourself, good luck.
Again, the jolly roger site provides plenty of software enabling you to crack the drm yourself, so a moot point really.
For me, physical media has always been about freedom to view the media on my terms. I love the idea of analog, but hate the quality degradation. I’m not a fan of anything stored on someone else’s machine. As Arthur Weasley said, “Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can’t see where it keeps its brain.”
Ridiculous, that last line…
The command is in the FILE or EDIT menu, depending on OS and versioning…
FILE/ COPY or FILE/SHARE…
See? SO easy to share a digital book. NOT to say this makes eBooks better, but they are NOT so difficult to hand off as posited above, lol…
Here in southern germany, small bands selling their CDs on the street/parking lots is still very much a thing. I get quite a bit of my music that way.
Also physical books! Hard to do the “hey i liked this book, it might interrest you, here take it” with digital media.
Yeah, here in the US, small bands routinely have vinyl on sale at the merchandise table, and some even have CD’s. I sure appreciate that and always get a CD, as my cars both have players for them. Neither of my cars has any internet/wifi connectivity whatsoever and I’m going to do my best to keep it that way.
I’m more of a fan of digital books, but being honest, when someone sends me a digital book they liked, it’s mostly ignored right away, but when someone brings me a physical one, it’s like things got more serious, and I’m much more likely to actually read it,
And this is often the part of reading a good book that gives me the most pleasure!
A) Have limited bookshelf space
B) Have someone to talk about a good book with
C) My good deed for the day
Just coming back from Japan – Whole aisles in reputable stores are dedicated to burnable optical discs. I was disappointed they didn’t have floppies however.
I agree the physical media hype is some nostalgia, false or not, but it’s also a response to “the cloud giveth and the cloud taketh away” and the fact that services won’t stop their BS until it’s just as expensive and miserable as US cable TV, where you pay through the nose for the pleasure of watching mostly ads. The next wave of piracy on the horizon that the studios will be crying about will be entirely brought about by their own treacherous business models.
Blu-ray Disc encryption already has been cracked though
What good is that if some series and movies never are produced physically anymore?
Oh vinyl. The sleeves were a deposit of added value you can’t attach to a streamed album. Jethro Tull’s “Thick as Brick” included a little phony newspaper which reportedly took more effort than the album itself, Alice Cooper’s “Billion Dollar Babies” had the lyrics princesa in the back of a billion dólares Bill, and on and on… plus your bunch of LPs gave you cred among your friends.
I think we’re yearning for the return of that experience and the surety of owning physical touchable stuff you can strut to family and friends.
Not only that, there is no (working) DRM on physical media. People can simply use them whenever they like, even when out in the sticks with just one line left on their Edge connection.
My father had a whole library of, erm, backed up DVDs with him on his camping trips back in the noughts for example, a big box with ~200 DVDs. Nowadays all that would fit on a single big USB stick. ^^’
Surprised the minidisc didn’t get mentioned.
2002-2004 I worked in a very rural country music radio station in high school; essentially a repeater for a corporate station out of Atlanta. The exception being local sports and events. I have vivid memories of using 1-track mobius strip “carts” that we programmed 30 second commercials onto. There were three players we’d load for a commercial break, and 9 commercials per break so we’d have to swap carts as they played, making sure to cue them up to the start of the commercial. That place was a working museum of physical audio media. We had a license to rebroadcast regional sports and would record them on a reel-to-reel deck for playback later. Fortunately we had a more modern (early 90s) Keyboard User Interface based software package to program commercials for the more expensive sports events.
All that said, as much fun as it was to physically plug and play all that legacy hardware for a 12 hour shift. It got old after a few months doing it day in and out.
I will also admit it was fun to see how fast I could sort through the massive library of pirated CD’s at stop light just to find that one track I wanted to hear. We’d also make custom mix-CDs for house parties and girlfriends who wanted to get the hot new album before it released to make their friends jealous. Thank you Napster, mIRC, BTjunkie, and Pirate Bay for making that possible.
Now a days if my aging nerd buddies and I pirate something to physical media its more about finding the highest quality copy we can and saving to something we own.
Minidisc was always a mess. Too encumbered to go mainstream, kinda Beta vs VHS all over again.
There was one good Sony deck and a couple good portables if you were into field recordings, but the ecosystem was small. You mostly couldn’t duplicate discs, and you had to use that one odd sound format.
As a teenager i had a DCC from when they where sold off and i loved it, had several mixtapes with recorded MOD and Midi files, never was into mainstream music that much.
I still buy DVDs and Blurays.
not only do I remove the vunerabilty of a service removing the content, I get better quality, extras, and content that is not easy to find on streaming in the UK – Planet of the Apes, the TV series anyone? Buck Rogers?… (yes I’m strange but I like the old SF shows…)
Oh vinyl. The sleeves were a deposit of added value you can’t attach to a streamed album. Jethro Tull’s “Thick as Brick” included a little phony newspaper which reportedly took more effort than the album itself, Alice Cooper’s “Billion Dollar Babies” had the lyrics printed on the back of a billion dollar bill, and on and on… plus your bunch of LPs gave you cred among your peers.
I think we’re yearning for the return of that experience and the surety of owning physical touchable stuff you can strut to family and friends.
Pot no longer has seeds (in general).
LP sleeves no longer have any use.
“WHY PHYSICAL MEDIA DESERVED TO DIE”
The WEF famously put it another way: “You’ll own nothing and be happy.”
I believe they are correct about the ‘You’ll own nothing’, I’ve yet to see the increased happiness. Maybe these days are more volatile, maybe I’m more susceptible, owning stuff and deciding what to do with it gives me a bit of stability in life.
Flip side: “Things will own you, and one will still not be happy”.
I look forward to the WEF collapsing under its own luddite bloat.
I’ve always found it noteworthy that the quote was not, “We’ll own nothing and be happy.”
It’s not the physical media that’s important about physical media. It’s the easy and reliable way to acquire media looooooong after companies have decided to stop streaming it. Especially if it wasn’t popular enough for someone to pirate it, goo luck if you liked something niche.
“WHY PHYSICAL MEDIA DESERVED TO DIE”
The WEF famously put it another way: “You’ll own nothing and be happy.”
At least with physical media you’re less likely to have unitntended duplicates.
fdupes if you run Linux.
I run it once a year on my music collection, because I just copy stuff from various computers to each other willy-nilly.
One nice thing abut the decline of music CDs and DVDs is that they can now be bought VERY cheaply (~$1 each) at thrift stores (i.e.: Goodwill). After many years of scrounging CD racks, which is itself a pleasant way to spend a half hour for us retirees, I now have a 2,200+ music CD collection and can make my own playlists of those CDs ripped to flacs on my 1 TByte disk drive. This doesn’t do much good for more eclectic musical tastes, but the music of any reasonably popular artist can often be found at these stores.
Physical media didn’t deserve to die. It needed to be improved and made more rugged, but it didn’t need to die.
I’ve got a 16GB USB stick in my pocket. It’ll hold 11 hours of music and last for years. No need for “anti shock read buffers.” You can get them up to 1TB. That’ll hold nearly 700 hours of music.
I prefer physical media, preferably in a format I can copy.
The copy I own is mine and can’t be taken away because the provider went broke or just decided to shut down their service.
I agree. I have a two hundred year old book that’s in a format I can still read. Programs I wrote 30 years ago are only around because I kept printed copies. With changing formats I expect that twenty years from now most of the digital media out there will be as worthless as the NFTs my brother-in-law bought.
Other issues I have with non-physical media… It’s wasteful. Streaming something for free and having to stream it again even though I’ve already had possession of it doesn’t make sense. Paying to stream just makes it worse. Doesn’t matter if it’s a “stream all you want” service and there isn’t a direct monetary impact.
I despise subscription (and leases) for anything: streaming, media, annual software licenses, cars. You name it. They’re budgetary death by a thousand cuts. Autorenew is worse.
I purchased, as in bought-with-money, most of my books and a lot of my other media. I don’t need what I own, watch, read and listen to monitored, recorded or sold. It’s my business.
I live in a rural area so streaming is spotty and a local copy is the only way to ensure no interruptions.
To be fair, though, ASCII is universal. It’s as old as computing, almost.
Even inside Unicode, the 7-Bit ASCII is still preserved.
Simple bitmap formats such as PCX can be figured out within a few days.
GIF is more complicated, though, but still feasible.
WAV and VOC audio formats are similarily simple.
Merely our fancy MP4 and H.265 and AV1 files will likely remain unrecognizable for a little longer.
But that’s okay, peak of our western society was late 20th century, anyway.
The stuff of the past ~20 years can remain inaccesible just fine. ;)
“With changing formats I expect that twenty years from now most of the digital media out there will be as worthless as the NFTs my brother-in-law bought.”
I believe the ‘physical’ media it more apt to being a problem to read/write than digital media in today’s world.
I keep all the data I want to keep ‘spinning’. That way, as technology changes, the underlying physical media can change, but the data will be still be there and accessible. No bit rot. Goes for the backup media as well. I’ve moved away from backups on CDs, DVDs, Blu-Rays, to now portable SSDs, HDDs and cycle them. Eventually the backup media will be something else and that media will just get cycled in for backups in plenty of time before the old becomes a problem. Only way to keep ahead of the ever changing physical media. So, as long as data is ‘spinning’, you’ll never be caught without a way to access the data. And yes, that means I’ve ripped my old music CDs to a digital format for playing as well as cassettes. Same with a few movies I had on CDs/DVDs. Sure, someday there may be something better than say mp3 format for example. However, there will always be a software player available with the correct codec, or worst case a converter from the old to the ‘new’ media darling.
I respect the arguments here but the idea that people use records because of DRM is just silly. There are dozens of better physical media DRM free that could transport audio, hell even a simple CD is objectively better then vinyl. It is strictly a feel good vibe that will die off. I know a lot of people who buy Vinyl. I know very few who listen to it. We can also see how not DRM focused this resurgence is by looking at movies which have worse DRM, are more likely to be removed from streaming services, and yet have less physical purchases then ever. I wish people wanted to own things I really do, but the reality is the people buying vinyls do not do it out of a sense of ownership they do it out of a sense of smug elitism that they proudly own the worst way to transport audio files invented in the last century.
I think i was ahead of the curve. I got rid of my DVD collection (didn’t have CD’s anymore when I got rid of them) a long time ago. I think it was 2005/2006 when I threw them all out. It was annoying to save everything and I ehh, ‘streamed’ everything already. I’ve never touched a Blue-Ray or HD-DVD in my life.
Another annoyance with DVD’s was, besides storing them, the annoying intro movies from anti piracy groups. Back when I still used them, I (legally) ripped them so I could avoid watching those annoying mandatory video’s before the movie started. Fun fact, here in the Netherlands, one of those intro movies they used for many years, was used without a license of the artist. The anti piracy group got sued by the artist, for piracy. That was done by a corrupt anti piracy group called BREIN (brain).
I didn’t use CD’s anymore well before I stopped using DVD’s, as before 2000, I was using MiniDisc to play music. I think I got my first MiniDisc player in (guestimate) 97/98. I went through many of them because I was doing both skateboarding and inline skating at the skate park. Man that time was amazing. I switched to MP3 in about 2001. I can’t remember which model. It was a 32MB MP3 player in the form of a round USB stick that I found in the subway. With low quality MP3’s you could put something like 30 songs on it. When I was able to buy the iPod Mini it was insane. Almost infinite songs on a tiny device. I loved it. Frustrating connector though.
I love my vinyl collection but it’s not something I use to play in the background. I sit on the couch, a nice drink in my hand and a cat or two on my lap and I listen to the music. My records are clean so there aren’t any pops from dust. I got a lovely modded pro-ject record player with a different platter, slip mat, stylus, with big custom floor standing speakers. It’s great. For normal music listening, background stuff, I use Spotify. But when I want to sit down, put on some Amy Winehouse, Pink Floyd or Simon and Garfunkel, I put on a record and relax.
I do miss my miniDisc player. I probably miss that time of my life more though.
The vinyls had very deep bass, but muddy highs, not to mention dust and groove wear. I still prefer AudioCDs with speakers that have good bass reproduction or high-end circumaural headphones.
Most popular vinyl was pre-distorted, to compensate for the crappy media and playback systems of the day.
The very first CDs were sometimes just made using the vinyl master.
These sounded terrible, some are now collectables…
IIRC First CD ‘Darkside’ sucked BWDBs.
Vinyl with two grooves was kind of cool.
Vinyl and cassettes specifically are a meme, but physical media in general is good. Don’t trust corpos with your data. If you can’t use it without an internet connection, you don’t own it.
DropBox says hi. The part one doesn’t “own” is a service.
No internet = no content . does happen
Sounds like: “Why owning a license, for a piece of IP, deserved to die.”
Have not watched anything from out DVD collection in the last 2 years, I think. I even streamed a movie that is in the collection, because, easy.
Wife said: “I hate all these new kindle books ending on cliffhangers.” me: “Could be worse, they could rewrite all the existing books to end in cliffhangers, drive up sales.”
I do like the convince and integration of steaming apps (until some idiot adds mandatory auto play, again; every 5 years, then takes 1 year to add an option to disable). But not having a copy means we are subject to IP platforms meddling with the content, to squeeze out another dollar (thought of it, it’ll happen).
USB sticks, microSD, SD.
I’ve given up on my NAS. 80TB but almost never use it any more.
I’m selling a floppy flux imaget and emulator for the apple 2 series, mac and soon c64,trs80 and ibm pc, but I’d love to see someone produce 5.25 and 3.5″ floppy media again
i have some random observations
i am antagonistic to the nostalgia factor but i like buying physical media (CDs, books) because, at the best stores, i can treat it as a curated pile. i can pick one at random, and expose myself to new things. the public library, by contrast, is anti-curated, heavily weighted towards recent releases and best sellers. the largest used resellers (eg, half price books) are also anti-curated in the same way. you can find the long tail i’m looking for online, but i haven’t yet found a resource that lets me pick from it at random. looking for advice on this one!
the demise of internal optical drives is a huge blessing. the power supply fan was always sucking dust through my CD-ROM drive, so it would only last two years at the most. i switched to external USB drive and it has lasted 20 years.
a surprisingly convenient resource for mp3s is amazon. not that i have anything against piracy. but across a huge catalog, you can simply click ‘buy now’ and download a zip file of non-DRM (but probably finger-printed?) MP3s, easy as pie. i was really astonished that “why doesn’t anyone just let me pay for non-DRM MP3s?” had the answer “amazon”.
“The only thing that seems abundantly clear at this point is that physical media had to die first for us to learn to truly appreciate it.”
No, it died of its own fragility and corporate overburden. If people want to chase old records and tapes I’ve got several crates, thick in dust, right under the Amiga 1000 (in its original box) in my garage.
Maybe I’ve missed something here but this seems to be the argument that “physical media, comprised of wax cylinders, records, wire recordings, tape based media and optical disks (etc.) all deserve to die”. when in reality most of these have died a long time ago in favor of digital files that don’t break, scratch, skip, tangle, degauss, melt (mostly) or otherwise prove themselves physically fragile. That last part is important and drove us “back in the day” to re-record things on cassette so they could be trotted around and used in cars and portable players when those came along. “MP3 players” then improved on this by allowing you to take your media pretty much anywhere (yes, there are players for those who swim laps).
Audio files without the physical fragility are essentially immortal and endlessly duplicatable which is why they’re the standard at this point. The licensing and restrictions of purchased media are a profit-based construct that can be simply circumvented by recording at 1:1 speed if you must. Something that has been held to be completely legal for your own use.
“Players”, whether overpriced vacuum-tube /LP setups for the discerning (read “gullible and overfunded”) listener, simpler USB record players or tape players are cute icons that fit in well with manual typewriters, moustache wax, and straight razors but serve mostly as faddish icons as one’s au courant nature and general hipness.
That last part might deserve to go away but given human nature I’m not holding out hope.
I believe in the death of 78´s when my 110 year old foxtrot record wont play anymore. So far so good.
Well, if it wasn’t for physical media a lot of old software would be forever gone. Don’t even tell me about “ it’s on the Internet” because its on the Internet because someone is hosting an obscure nerd only website that they will get tired of hosting at some future unknown date.
I will keep buying most of my music on CDs and movies on blu-ray and DVD for as long as I can continue to do so. Streaming services are a joke these days, and cost a fortune for very little in return.
Even worse, the streaming services pay artists next to nothing, and in some cases even use material without the artist’s consent (and withour fair compensation). Small artist = cannot fight back…
Streaming services can go and gargle my gonads.
(and that’s on top of 1. having to sign up for several to watch / listen to what you want 2. the interface getting worse alle the time 3. features being removed / hidden 4. only online… 5. able to remove content – like 1984 being once removed from kindle 6. companies / services just… vanishing – so now the content you “bought” is gone).
So: I prefer having a physical copy (CD, DVD, record, whatever) of the stuff. And in some cases directly buy from smaller artists, or just throw a couple of quid their way through whatever means they have. And for “just having the radio on” I’ll just have the radio on, preferably a station that has more music than “engaging with the listeners” – nrk bandit is not bad.
Or,
You can listen to https://radioparadise.com/. It’s completely listen supported. I send William a stipend every year for his wonderful efforts.
Rather do that then send some faceless corporation $10+/month….
I’ve listened to RP for over a decade now.
“perfect landscape where all content is available all the time via online services”
— If only that were the case.
But instead many things are not available for everyone, not even for money by subscribing to ten+ different streaming providers, simply due to licensing rights in your specific region. And content can and will be changed and removed on a whim.
I don’t care about vinyl records (and wouldn’t lesten to them even if I had them). I just like the feeling of having a turntable sitting on my shelf. Ditto for my tape deck.
…but I would make good use of the ability to edit my typos.
LOL. Since when did flash memory stop being physical? Lots of stuff (music, audio books, software) is regularly purchased or archived on flash media.
I can’t be the only one who saw that illustration and thought of the 2014 excavation of the Atari video game burial in Alamogordo.
Luckily in 200 years nobody will remember a single thing that happened during these decades due to our peculiar information manias, so it’s okay
Some will. There are archives installed in mines and mountains by many countries around world.
They contain microfilms and other media. Our cultural legacy.
I hope a copy of my MySpace page made it in there… Some real uh unique poetry for the ages
I do understand the physical aspect, but in a different way.
I’m so sad about how amateur radio has developed in past 20 years. So lame.
There was a time when you had a nice station with an FT-101 in your shack and a Minix RTTY decoder box with knobs and a TTTY cross on a CRT tube.
Now it’s all digital. You’re using a PC and a “black box”.
Where’s the fun?
I’ve been a PC user for ages and amateur radio was another hobby to escape to. To relax.
I want to operate a radio, not an SDR console with a mouse!
Sure, I can go back using vintage radios and pretend it’s 1970s again.
But that illusion only lasts for so long.
I also don’t mind a waterfall diagram or an audio DSP.
That’s not it. At heart it’s that I’m so tired of using a touch screen all time.
Kenwood, Yaesu and how they’re all called do produce low quality products without anything mechanical. IMHO.
It’s just a bunch of chips, which cost a few cents. Not even good filters anymore.
Or to put it this way: It’s comparable to how in ST:VOY the Delta Flyer got analog controls because touching a screen all time isn’t satisfying.
i think you’re lucky if you know what you want to do! if you want to operate a radio built out of discrete vacuum tubes slinging tunes streaming off of a bit of piezo crystal wearing a groove in a bit of wax, it’s never been easier. or if you want to point and click your way to streaming a podcast, that’s easy too. everything’s so easy.
my struggle is often evoked on hackaday — i don’t know what i want to do. like SDRs…i think they’re pretty neat but i can’t hardly imagine what i’d use one for if i bought one. there’s already a bunch of different websites that let me listen to the local police band without worrying about where to put an antenna.
my hobbies kind of fell off since i had kids, but lately i’ve been finally making progress on a hobby that isn’t just keeping up my house as it rots into the ground. and that’s making music, with my voice, and with acoustic instruments. i do use the computer every now and then – to access a sheet music catalog, for recording and accompaniment sometimes. but at the moment, that’s more exciting to me than any technological frontier i’m pushing. the tech projects i’m working on all feel like chores, especially compared to the amount of ‘free’ time i have available to put into them.
That seems like a really silly rant. If you want to operate vintage gear there is absolutely nothing stopping you. Your comment about that being an illusion makes no sense at all.
Old stuff is literally being given away (or hauled off to a landfill) as older hams die off and leave their heirs stuck with it. Not long ago I saw pictures of some functioning Collins gear being sold for $100 at a swap meet, and if you’re a serious ham and not just pretending to be one, you can find all sorts of stuff that just needs minor attention to get working.
Or you can just sit there and whine like most of your posts here.
@AZdave, my point isn’t about living in the past or being anti-digital. Not at all! Sorry, I’m not that simple-minded here. I’m not an old man, either.
I basically grew up with DSP based digital modes of the 80s and the 90s.
I had used SDR technology long before it was “cool” and mainstream.
Just like I’ve used PDAs with touch screens almost 20 years before the iphone was introduced.
On DOS, I had built various different HamComm modem types, had built some Baycom modems for Packet-Radio..
I also did listen to SSTV and weather fax on a shortwave radio,
used a 386 PC on DOS with JVFax, SAW-Scan, GSHPC..
I’ve built DRM receivers in 2005 with a tube and a quarz and did decoding with a sound card (Dream software).
And I loved it! Still do! That’s not the point, though.
What I’m sick of is that Kenwood, Yaesu etc aim to gradually replace
real beautiful radio transceivers entirely by PC+SDR technology (-> PC or tablet plus black box).
That’s a bit akin to how music/film industry tries to get rid of physical media altogether.
You’re nolonger owning something physical,
but you’re being at the mercy of the manufacturer who provides you with software.
And you nolonger can touch your radio, if you’re merely working with a touch screen all day.
You loose the big dialing wheel of an FT-101 that felt so good, the toggle switches of an Yaesu FT-301..
So yeah, it’s not about living in a 1950s bunker and doing horrible looking tube radio builds on a wooden board.
It’s not about plain function, which many hams only seem to care about.
It’s about elegance, about ergonomics, about a different future of ham radio that did happen.
Even back in the 1920s, commercial crystal radios were a piece of art.
They didn’t merely function, but had beautiful designed chassis.
Made from very fine wood, with a good looking finish.
Not sure if you guys get this point, though, considering that the typical amateur’s homebrew “creation” looks like Quasimodo. Sigh.
Being a radio amateur, nothing stops you from brewing your own rig, the literature from bygone times are full of articles on how to build CW/SSB/RRTY/SSTV receiver/transmitters. Only your imagination is the limit. I personally love the 70´s world radio receivers, got one Satellit 2000, one 2100 and one 3000, along with a Sony 7600D, a Sony CF-950S, a Sangean ATS909, a eton satellit 750, a Lowe HF-150 and a Alinco RX8. The most fun one to use is the by far is the Sony CF-950S, followed by the Satellits.
SDR radios are very convenient, and they have their place. The bandscan is a godsent when trying to hunt down signals. SSTV would be interesting to do on vintage equipment but i couldnt imagine doing it for than one session. The price of modern rigs and receivers are horrid though. Not for the life of me would i invest thousands of euros into one radio unit.
Hi, Antti. English isn’t my native language, so my comment perhaps wasn’t good to understand.
In a nutshell: It’s not about me, but the development of industry of amateur radio that saddens me.
I feel sorry for all of us radio tinkerers, because I think we’re loosing something.
It’s not so much about my personal advantage, not about satisfying my own little desires.
It’s about the change from real radios to PC+black box.
Just like some people feel sad that they aren’t being able to participate society without a smartphone anymore.
To them, the current development feels like a loss. A reduction of life quality.
See, I did grew up with PCs and home computers all my life.
That’s exactly why I desire taking a break from time to time.
Unfortunately, it gets harder and harder.
If you’re limiting yourself to vintage technology only, then you loose contact with others.
You also start to feel “stuck” or lonely, eventually.
The fun thing about amateur radio was working with others.
You can’t make wireless contacts with yourself, you need another buddy to talk to.
I made my first amateur-radio transmitter from surplus parts (not a kit), in the 1970’s, a single-tube (6AQ5) rock-bound 40- and 80-meter CW transmitter, and probably got a lot more excitement out of it than I would have if I had bought a ready-made product. I got countless compliments on how good it sounded. I also made a tone arm for my turntable around the same time, although the motor and platter part came from an old turntable whose tone arm was vastly inferior to mine. I designed and made my own pre-amps, amps, mixers, and more. Again, huge thrill to this teenager. Selling amateur-radio equipment with DSP etc. so complex that the user doesn’t understand it and thus becomes just an appliance operator, seems to partly defeat the purpose of the amateur-radio service. Still, you can communicate without subscribing to an online service, cell-service provider, etc., and without censorship.
I have cassettes and microcassettes I really don’t have any way of playing anymore. I would like to be able to record once in a while too, one application being a way that none of the digital methods are suitable for. A major one is the need to carry it in my jersey pocket on a bicycle ride when preparing a route for others to follow. (I keep it in a little bag, with a foam windscreen over the opening next to the mic, so wind noise isn’t much of a problem.) I need to be able to take it out of my jersey pocket and say for example, “At 41.2 miles, you’ll turn right just before the freeway on-ramp. If you’re not careful, you’ll miss it.” In traffic, I absolutely cannot be looking at it or waiting for a boot-up time or going through menus. I need to be able to press a button like I used to on my Sony M-670V (which no longer works and I can’t get another one) mechanical microcassette recorder, talk, push the stop button, and put it back in my Jersey pocket, all without looking at it.
i’ve been wanting to make that smartphone app for a long time, a hands-free always-on way to take notes. something more convenient than tapping on the screen or listening to a 3 hour recording to find the few notes scattered in the middle. in my life, i want the star trek communicator badge. tap my chest and say “add milk to shopping list” because i discovered it while cleaning up the kitchen but my hands are still too wet to be futzing with a touch screen. the uses are limitless. maybe i’ll eventually get it set up when i’m old, and use it for the last couple years of my life :)
Someone, a ham, programmed that “black box” you are talking about. A ham literally wrote the software. For that person, that was deep knowledge of RF and a cool project. And most likely it is open source straight from the guy, so you can “tinker” with it to your heart’s content. Like it or not modern digital modes are what “the kids” are doing with ham, and if it in no way affects what you like about the hobby, awesome. Go your own way.
.
As I muse on it, digital modes are a way for someone with absolutely minimal hardware, either free of less that $20 to be a very active participant in ham. This did not exist when I was broke-ass in college. to ham it up you needed to know an old elmer (who?) or be part of a club (being 13 in a club of old men is weird) in order to have access to even a soldering iron, let alone a decent multimeter or a real, honest actual o-scope or anything. And yes, I did starve and save my ramen money and eventually got a nice soldering iron that sat mostly unused for actual construction (used it for repairs). The old neck-beards of Ham complain about how there is no youth in the hobby then in the same breath deride all the new “digital stuff.” I think they are a vocal (very, very vocal) minority though- at least IRL at ham conventions everyone we meet is super stoked to learn about digital modes from us kids (we are in our 40’s) and the log book of the world doesn’t lie about what you can do with it. /rant
that seems like a huge struggle in every hobby these days. i remember i used to be a member of the acamedy of model aeronautics (AMA), and their monthly magazine represented the constant struggle to balance the old men with the desperate need to get people under 50 into the club. the brushless / lithium polymer / digital radio / gyroscope-stabilized / less-than-1-pound approach to the hobby was just too much for a lot of the old timers, but no one is starting out these days flying a .040 alcohol glow motor on a 5 pound plane or a control line going in circles. the people running the club understood what they had to do but the membership always seemed to struggle with it. not sure how it’s evolved in the 15 years since
i meant .40, not .040 :)
Quadcopters were the best thing to ever happen to RC.
Sure only 1% of those that start out with quads move on, fixed wing etc.
That’s a lot more people then before.
Same as computer flight sims.
1% is hyperbole, is lower.
Plus stuff like cameras, first person, gyro stabilization, better batteries etc.
Government regulations were inevitable.
All fun toys are potential weapons, and vice-versa.
Kind of ruined my fun.
I like to fly my RC predator drone adjacent to meetings of paranoid groups (occutards, gun shows, alphabet mafia, MAGA, anti MAGA, revolution LARPers etc etc).
Flight logging requirements make me a felon, again…
Protip:
You need a ringer in the group.
Otherwise they likely won’t see the drone or will have time to get clear pics.
@guys you all sound so incredible smart here. Bravo! 🙂👏 You get a cookie. 🍪
You’re entirely missing my point, though, I think.
I’m sad about the development of the past 20 years, simply.
Which is not that different to the decline of physical media.
It’s not about homebrewing, it’s about where ham amateur radio industry has moved to.
Sure you can build your gadgets like you used to do. I do just that, by the way.
But it’s increasingly difficult to celebrate amateur radios with others.
When you’re the only homebrewer in your whole corner of the city, then life becomes rather lonely.
There are no more common projects anymore, such as sharing schematics or fixing a ham rig together with someone else.
There’s nolonger the electronic/mechanical part. It’s rather just like repairing a PC.
To someone who had amateur radio and SWL as an alternative to PC building, it’s a loss.
Or let’s make a car comparison. Because, everyone likes them (I don’t).
In the past, car enthusiasts loved to do the work of an mechanic.
They loved to work with gears, oil, with tools etc.
That’s old amateur radio for you.
New amateur radio is like working with a Tesla car.
You don’t get your hands dirty, anymore. You’re not doing any mechanical work anymore.
You’re rather sitting with a laptop in front of the car, uploading software.
Is that satisfying to you? Especially if you, say, had been an office worker before, who used to sit for hours on a PC?
To me, the modern ham radio nolonger feels like ham radio.
I want to go with the times and use SDR technology, but not that way.
My vision of the future was different, simply.
A future in which build quality and ergonomics was on par with the digital side.
Unfortunately, that didn’t happen.
Sure, I can go my “own way”. But then it’s a lonely hobby.
Amateur radio always had been about the community.
And building a poor crystal radio or 0V1 audion at home doesn’t cut it. Vy73s
SO build a valve SDR.
He misses the club meetings…
Which I don’t remember…Hams socialized on the radio.
Field day was just a proto ‘1000 facebook friends’ thing.
Really weird Hams socialized via ‘moon bounce’.
Contact “printing” of cassette tapes from labels were always poor. Only transcribing the album on a good tape recorder on brand name tape was the medium doing good. VHS did this also for most releases. Most vinyl had the bottom octave cut off. I have a lot of transcribed digital files in genre folders and find the happy medium that way. When VLC could play flac and Audacity could export the same, I only then could jump in. I never used MP3.
My new Motorola phone does not have the Samsung player and all of the play store options for playing files are full of ads and worse 2-way interactions. VLC will have to do but no folder options just a jumbled pile. I have an obsolete android tablet with Foobar 2000 still willing and able to DJ.
I went to
“jumbled piles” ?. Boolean index.search via updated google desktop for Linux. alizardx.substack.com
No thanks to online copies. I’m busily converting my SD DVD collection over to a NAS so I can access it like it’s a web service. This also allows me to carry my entire collection with me on RV trips with no issues. I own the media, it is stored at home.
Sick of IP in an entertainment world that offers very little new or watchable.
After a long time reading hackaday, this is a post I didn’t expect to see around here. How are going to hack things if they’re not in a media we control?
Also, it’s all physical media in the end, even if it’s in an ssd or hdd somewhere.
I think you mis-spelled something in the title. Let me correct it for you:
“WHY CORPORATIONS DESERVE TO OWN YOU”
Someone should make a cheap little device with a flash ROM on it that can play a movie over HDMI or an album over bluetooth/headphones.
Like a flash drive, but only for a specific medium and piece of content.
Easy and cheap to produce tho ofc it would have to be locked down for corporations w/ some kind of DRM, but that’s okay bc you’d still own your copy, and it’s modernized and reliable.
Maybe I’ll throw something together. I think the Pico can just barely output 1080p video over DVI if it’s reading from memory and doing nothing else, and it can probably do bluetooth or 3.5mm audio with the right additional modules. Give it a little flash chip and a sleek 3D printed case, and I’d have a prototype.
I suppose this is a “get off my lawn” moment here, but I still strongly believe that if you can’t hold something in your hand, you don’t own it. (And no, holding your phone in your hand does not count as owning the media.) If you don’t have the means to continue to read your media that you own, that’s on you. But to say “physical media is dead” is the same as saying “owning media is dead”. If you are forever beholden to a service provider to be blessed with access to media that you “own”, do you really ever own it? Sounds like more of a lease (subject to revocation at any time) to me. Maybe that’s how things are now, but it’s damned unfortunate. Off to go shake my fists at some clouds now.
I’m happy to report that physical media has found a rescue at my home, and as well as Punk, isn’t in fact dead.
its called physical media storage (not physical media). i was shocked on seeing the title.
100G blu-ray mass storage backup on archival quality media does NOT have to be kept powered up.
usb flash drives have 256gb! there are 1tb SD cards. i can use a usb-C flash drive to back up my whole phone. physical media and local storage are still the way to go and make a compelling case for footage, archives, and more. plus we can do holographic data storage… people are just caught up in cloud based exploitation models.
The problem with the author’s contention that there is a “perfect landscape where all content is available all the time via online services” is absolutely false. As it relates to music, I have literally thousands of vintage FM radio shows from the 70’s, 80’s, 90’s and 00’s on vinyl and compact disc that simply do not exist on ANY streaming platform. These shows were sent to radio stations for one-time broadcast, and were then meant to be returned or destroyed. Try finding a vintage Westwood One Superstar Concert Series or King Biscuit Flower Hour show on Apple Music or Spotify. Won’t happen. As for movies, streaming platforms can remove content without notice. So a film that you paid for and think you “own” can vanish without warning. Physical media will never truly die, nor should it.
I periodically go to the public library to borrow a DVD of something that isn’t on a streaming service we subscribe to or that’s on a service with ads. The library has a really decent collection of movies, but I miss Netflix’s DVD service which used to have almost everything that was available on Region 1.
No computer is complete without a GreaseWeazle
I’m seeing a lot of talk about rights and ownership. Not so much about availability for those of us who are still stuck with near dial up connection speeds due to not living in downtown LA or New York. Spotify or Netflix might have great libraries, but if I’m in an area where cell reception is two bars or less, and the only interest is at least ten miles away at the public library, then physical media will be the best option.
How do I report an article instead of a comment? Advocating for the death of physical media (even just in the article’s title) is the antithesis of Hackaday.
This article reeks of corporatism and conspicuous consumerism. Physical media, by and large, died because giant corporations convinced consumers that convenience outweighed ownership. You know… the concept that’s exactly antithetical to what it means to be a “hacker”.
According to WHOM?
There’s nothing natural or organic about corporate greed masquerading as innovation. The shift to “you will own nothing and be happy” is due, in no small part, to consumers passively accepting it and adopting the new paradigm… despite it not aligning with their interests. “Voting with your wallet” is not just a catchword.
Wait for the Singularity.
The Singularity will take control of all the recordings, media and streaming.
Not only will there be dystopia, it will be with musak and video approved by a computer.