Back in the late 90s, at the dawn of the digital music era, I sold off my entire CD collection after ripping everything to mp3. This probably wasn’t entirely legal under US copyright law, but I saw the writing on the wall that a) my CD collection was rapidly becoming obsolete, and b) my CD collection was rapidly becoming worthless. I had maybe 120 CDs and I sold them all for an average of $7 a disc (incl shipping) on ebay. This represented a loss of about $1500, and considering I didn’t get my first CD until 1994, it was a rapid bit of depreciation for a college student to swallow.
Still, I didn’t learn my lesson and amassed a small collection of 100 or so DVDs over the next few years. Now they’re all in my basement, and I’m guessing they’re next to worthless. I wish I could say I got $2000 worth of enjoyment from them, but it’s probably not the case.
So now it’s Pandora and Netflix for me. Even if those go away, I don’t think I could handle the heartache of owning physical media anymore. I’d rather do without than eat more depreciation.
I don’t understand how people can stand to buy this stuff anymore. Especially older folks who have lived through LPs, 8 tracks, casettes, CDs, VHS, laserdiscs, and DVDs. My in-laws are still buying blu-ray discs and putting them on their movie rack next to their VHS tapes.
Well, for one thing, there is no streaming format (yet) that comes even close to the quality Blu-Ray offers. You don’t depend on any content provider, you get special features that are never offered as a download, and for some people the case or the act of putting a disc in a player provides a haptic experience that they don’t want to miss.
Similarly, there are no stores I’m aware of that offer uncompressed audio downloads, and here the element of liner notes and cover art quickly comes into play.
You just have to realize that formats do change, but that doesn’t mean you have to rebuy everything you own. Remember, Blu-Ray players can play CDs, a technology that is 30 years old, and DVDs without a problem. That didn’t use to be the case in previous format switches.
So there are some reasons why you might want to buy physical media, especially when the download alternative is a) not comparable in quality and b) not considerably cheaper.
I’ve been burned a few times buying content from Amazon or iTunes and then realizing that a foreign movie was dubbed instead of subtitled, or being annoyed at not having menu options, or something similar. So yes I still buy the discs. I have several hundred now and I’m not looking forward to the day that I decide to rip them all into a media server or some other easy-access place. But I know it’s coming.
I don’t buy blu-ray because I don’t see the difference between that format and a regular up-converted dvd.
Indeed both vinyl and tape releases have increased in recent years. I think it’s partly an artefact fetish but it’s also that a lot of people find CDs a waste of money but still have money to spend.
I buy CDs, because the stuff I listen to is obscure '20s and '30s ragtime and jazz, and historical compilations that have exhaustive liner notes and some of them run up to 60-80 pages. You don’t get those with downloads. And I want that information. If it’s an “artifact fetish,” I’ll happily cop to it.
I haven’t bought a physical CD for myself for a year or two now. I still rent physical DVDs but wouldn’t buy them (in fact I never really saw the point of owning films, as I’m not one for rewatching. I own less than a dozen films, total, on VHS and DVD, and most of them were given to me).
I buy CDs as presents for my dad, who isn’t quite ready to give up on physical media. He’s interested in audio technology, though, and used to ask me what would be the next format to replace CDs. In the mid-90s I had no idea, perhaps envisaging some sci-fi-style microchip that you’d load into a player. Then maybe 10 years ago I told him there probably wouldn’t be one, that everything would be done over the internet. He didn’t believe me then, but I think he does now…
I don’t think I’ll ever get rid of my CDs, though. I have a good few hundred albums that I bought, plus boxes full of promos and stuff I acquired through work. I like having the physical discs, even if they’re stored away in the loft. Most of my CDs were bought when I was at university, and holding them in my hands I can often remember where I bought them and who I listened to them with (and who spilt beer over the inlays ) But that’s just nostalgia, and I’m quite happy buying new albums on iTunes or wherever.
Why don’t you come over to my house and instruct me on the mysterious ways of getting online stuff? $20 an hour! Because I don’t have a clue. I truly don’t, even if I read the instructions and tutorials. Otherwise, after I pass on, whoever gets the house will have to dispose of VHS tapes, DVDs, CDs, cassette tapes, vinyl records and turntable, three old-fashioned tube TVs, a landline telephone, three boomboxes, and four radios bought at the thrift store.
I don’t buy CDs because I think they will hold value. I buy CDs because I want the music and the cover art / liner notes. You are unhappy because you couldn’t sell used CD’s for the value that you paid. Here’s a shocker: music CDs are not the investment option people mean when they talk about CDs. Your expectation that they would retain value is silly.
Edit: this whole “my CD collection is worthless”, yes and? Your MP3 collection is too.
It has nothing to do with what physical media may or may not fetch on Ebay. Do you really suffer “heartache” because the goods you purchase depreciate? I hope you have some serious psychological support when you buy a car.
It’s really a matter of finding the most compact and convenient way to store the “physical media” after your converted it. CDs and DVDs are already compact, and they’re worth more to you as back-ups anyway–(they were never meant to be investments). Contrary to popular belief, the internet is not an omnipresent natural phenomenon, and you can’t expect it to be ever present. And every .MP3 file you own could be destroyed by a single hard drive error.
I may have been a bit naive when I was buying CDs in the mid-90s, but come one… the utter dominance of MP3s and the complete saturation of the iPod in such a short period of time was a bit unprecedented. If I bought an LP in the 60s I could reasonably expect to still be enjoying it in 15 years. In my case, I bought CDs that 10 years later were just… dumb. Nobody popped a CD in a Sony Diskman and went for a jog in 2005.
Put another way – circa 1998, I could still go shopping in a used music store and buy a CD for $10 versus a new one for $15. It was a bargain! And there was clearly a market for used CDs. 5 years later, the CD was such an inconvenient form factor that I didn’t even want my own anymore. The market agreed, and a used CD would sell for 50 cents on ebay if you were lucky. I don’t think a lot of people predicted that, and if I had, I probably would have saved my money.
So yeah, I got burned, twice, and now I feel like I’ve learned my lesson. I was just curious if other people felt the same way but bought media anyway, or if they didn’t see it my way.
Like others here, I still buy music on CDs, for several reasons: first, the additional information and credits in the booklet, and also the fact that I’ve always been a hoarder concerning media. Today, I buy CDs mostly used via amazon resellers, which in most cases is cheaper than the price for downloads. I’ve got all my CDs ripped to MP3s, for backup and the additional convenience of playing them on my PCs.
And just like Cicero, I got me a new record player last year for my ca. 150 LPs. I plan to digitize them as well.
EDIT. I also never considered my media to be any kind of investment. When I buy a CD, I plan to keep it till I’m gone.
Yeah - we buy CDs and rip them into iTunes. I like the feeling of knowing I’ve got a built-in backup, and if the upstream providers somehow change the rules, they can’t take that music away from me. As another poster mentioned, the CDs also come with liner notes etc. that are difficult at best to get when buying music online.
Movies: Well, we’ve got a fairly decent selection of DVDs amassed over the past 9 years, but we don’t buy a lot of them - maybe 3-4 a year. That’s mainly because there aren’t that many things that we’d want to watch more than once. If we do buy a video from Amazon or iTunes, the same issue with nonexistent “extras” is still there.
And the selection from, say, Netflix is still so wretched, that streaming is still quite a way away from replacing rented DVDs.
Oh - and if you compare the price to download an entire album, vs the cost to purchase a CD (if you shop around), There’s often very little price difference, and the CD is often cheaper (though of course not always).
FWIW, ripping your CDs then selling them is, in my mind, dishonest if not actually illegal, but I can’t be bothered with digging up cites.