Sure. Why not?
It’s been about five years since I bought CDs with any regularity. I still get a few CDs via subscription series and such, and I get some for Christmas, but I can’t remember the last time I bought one outright. (And I’m someone who used to buy at least 4-5 CDs a month, more if I found good used stuff, when I was making a tiny fraction of what I make now.)
I still buy and listen to records, but it’s a novelty thing. 95% of my music listening is via my laptop or another device.
For the last few months the vast majority of my listening has been via Spotify, which works well both on my laptop and my mobile phone, so I think I’m going through yet another paradigm shift in which downloading mp3s to my hard drive and devices is similarly becoming a thing of the past.
I buy CDs at live shows (indie bands) but that’s about it.
When I was a teen I bought new CDs, used CDs, tapes, and tons of traded live shows on tape.
I stopped doing new music altogether for a long time. Maybe 8-10 years. Now, I am a huge sucker for the Amazon $5 MP3 albums and buy more new (to me) music than I have since I was 15 and going to the used CD shops every weekend.
I’ve never been one to buy DVDs. I got a BD player in February and simply signed up for the BD service on Netflix.
Pretty much along these lines for me. I love music and having the art and the liner notes in a physical capacity is important to me. I like having the physical collection of CDs to go along with my digital collection of songs. I will sometimes download a leak of a new album and hear the whole thing before I get the CD, but actually holding and listening to it off of the CD is still a different experience.
I feel much the same way about a lot of other things. For instance, some people will collect action figures or whatever and keep them in the box because they’re worth more that way. My view is that, since I’m collecting it for my own enjoyment and not to resell it in 20 years, I shouldn’t be concerned with what it’s worth, I should be concerned with getting the maximum enjoyment out of it. Having the physical media, especially since it is necessarily in better quality, it comes with the art and liner notes, and often at the same price, and often lower, that I could download just the MP3, why should I care if I the CDs are actually worth something to someone else or not?
Moreso, maybe some really common CD from a top 40 band or whatever my not be worth something, but as one gets into more obscure and harder to obtain music, the CDs will maintain or increase in value. I have more than a few CDs that I could probably sell for quite a bit. For instance, I have some original pressings of bands that were obscure for years and once they got more recognition and fans and their older stuff started to get remastered and re-released, those original pressings went way up in value, not that I have any intention of selling them.
Either way, if you’re looking at them as some sort of “investment”, well, you’re doing it wrong.
I didn’t mean to imply that I expect my media collection to grow in value like an investment, just that if I decide I don’t want it anymore, it’d be nice if it still had some residual value. Some things you expect to be worthless after 10 years, like PC, and others you expect to still have some use to somebody somewhere, like a couch or a car, even if you can’t get more than 25% of your money back. Especially if there’s no physical degradation of the product.
It’s most likely both illegal and dishonest, but it’s not something I lose a lot of sleep over.
But your post reminds me that I’m not advocated legal iTunes downloads as an alternative, since you’re right, they’re not really any cheaper and they intrinsically have no resale value. I’m a big fan of Pandora and the like for the simple reason that I don’t have to worry about what happens if my tastes change or a better format comes out.
When we talk about physical media, we shouldn’t forget everything that’s printed on paper or any other suitable material.
I’d never buy a Kindle:
[ul][li]I like the sensory experience of a book in my hands. []A book is more durable and doesn’t depend on access to electricity.[]Its physicality is a safeguard against alteration and deletion – the incident with Amazon has been a red flag for me. I won’t give anyone the means to censor me that easily.[/li][/ul]
From my pov, the biggest two drawbacks of any generation of physical digital media so far are:
a) The short lifespan of any individual medium (CD, DVD, memory cards and so on are not safe storages for data for more than a decade, most of them won’t be intact after two decades); and
b) The relatively short life cycle of any of the digital media we have developed so far: the CD is already on its way out, the DVD will be up to date for maybe another decade. Once a medium is obsolete, the players will follow sooner or later - magnetic tape is one example and a sad one, a lot of valuable data is already lost to us.
Archaeologists are “joking” for some time now that the early era of high-tech media will be a “vanished age” for future historians because most information will have simply degraded in a couple of decades after their initial storage or can’t be accessed any longer due to the lack of suitable Hard- and Software.
Inventions like the M-Disc are one way to counter oblivion, endeavors like the Rosetta project another and, of course, a world-wide system of inter-linked storage media that are backup-ed and replaced continuously isn’t a bad idea either.
We have already lost an incredible amount of scientific and cultural information but we might be able to preserve much more for future generations than we could have hoped for just a decade ago.
Very little. A handful of shows that I am really quite passionate about and want to have available to watch at a moment’s notice; a handful of generally hardcover books for the same basic reason–and fewer of those, now that I have a kindle.
All of these decisions are motivated somewhat by space: living in a Manhattan apartment for the foreseeable future, I really don’t have room for shelves and shelves of books/CDs/DVDs. In the case of books, I realized a while ago that I rarely read a book a second time; if I’m not going to do that (and sometimes even if I might) it makes more sense to get it from the library for free than to drop $15-30 on something that’ll gather dust on a shelf. It’s similar with DVDs–other than my very favorite movies and shows, it’s not likely that I’m going to have a burning urge to watch something a second time. And even if I do, netflix is always there to ship me the disc. Streaming, sadly, is not up to snuff yet in terms of available content. Music, on yet a third hand, is just more convenient in every way to store and enjoy digitally, since I’m not enough of an audiophile to notice the difference between an MP3 or similar format and a CD. I don’t think I ever looked at a liner note or cover art more than once, if even that–I’d pull it out, toss it into a film box I got from my dad, and slip the CD into one of my binders, hopelessly disorganized. No more hunting for the CD I want to listen to–just search and click play.
It is handy to have a few DVD’s / Blurays around when cable/internet goes out and you wnt to watch something.
“Nobody” used a Sony Diskman in 2005? Maybe not, but I’m still driving an older car, and my car has 2 inputs: cassette and CD player. I am not going to invest in a new stereo, cause it works just fine. I got the stupid cassette adapter for my MP3 player, but my music collection is way bigger than what you are talking, and I can’t fit everything I might want to listen to on my 16Gb MP3. So I do still use my CDs, in my car, in 2011. Maybe not a Diskman, but that’s because I don’t have a need to take music everywhere I go. When I’m outside walking, I like to hear what the birds have to say, as it is far more enlightening that listening to the same music I’ve already heard.
Welcome to a world based on technology, where things are constantly evolving, and this has only sped up over the last decade. Guess what, something will come out to replace MP3’s someday, and your Ipod will be obsolete too. Do I have an inside track - no, but that’s happened constantly with every music delivery form. What makes you think this is the pinnacle achievement that nothing else can top?
In about 20 yrs, you’re going to be pissed because you have no CD’s to rip to the new standard of media, and your MP3 player has crapped out. So now you have to buy your music collection all over again. Meanwhile, I will still have my old CD’s, and will probably still have a device to play them on, and the ability to create whatever new format music will come in.
As far as your “accounting” for depreciation: study accounting a little more, and you’ll discover this neat concept of materiality. CDs aren’t material, thus no one in their right mind from an accounting perspective would consider it an “asset” to be depreciated. You expense them.
All of our DVD’s are now on our media server along with all of our CD’s. For me that wasn’t a huge move. We haven’t purchased physical media of these types in several years and it’s not an issue.
Books are much harder. I haven’t purchased a physical book in almost a year and we’re now donating our entire book collection. To add a little perspective, other than specific gifts that I usually replace in my own collection later I haven’t disposed of a book my entire life. We’ve been talking about doing it for over a year and I do all of my reading on the iPad so there is no real reason to keep them. I reread books all the time but I’ve been recreating my library in electronic format every time I have the urge for a particular book and I expect to continue to do so but it’s still REALLY hard to actually deliver all these books to Goodwill. We emptied most of the bookshelves in June when my daughter moved back into my library room but they’ve been occupying an entire wall of the living room ever since. Last weekend we took about 1/3 of them to Goodwill (filled the van with boxes) and we’ll probably deliver another set this weekend.
The one huge remaining issue is our D&D stuff. I’ve got the lifetime collection of two packrat geeks in 13 large rubbermaid totes plus 3 stacks in the living room about 2’ tall. Goodwill doesn’t want anything that’s not an actual book, I know I won’t take the time to ebay any of it but I can’t bring myself to just toss it all in recycling. Anyone have any ideas where I could get rid of this volume of stuff and not feel like I’m abandoning a small child?
If you still have the mp3 copies of the music and you sold them, sounds like you have lost nothing of value to you and gained a few bucks for every CD. Sounds like a good deal.
When you put it that way, I sound like a dick 
And yet, if I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t.
I still buy DVDs, since I don’t have a convenient way of carrying movies and watching them somewhere other than my computer at a decent quality if I’m streaming. When I want to play a movie while I sew, or while I’m in bed, I need to use a DVD.
I don’t buy CDs anymore, because we have several MP3 players around the house, so music has become mobile enough that I no longer need the physical media.
I buy CDs because I like having the liner notes & art and the back-up. Also, I like having some CDs in my car for times I forget my mp3 player.
Come to think of it, I’ve had several mp3 players stolen over the years so it was nice then as well to have CDs around until I replaced it. I could either buy mp3’s and burn them onto a CD or buy CDs and rip them into mp3s. Both are equally “hard” but the latter provides me with a better quality CD and the afore mentioned benefits.
I’m your exact opposite; I hope to never buy another physical book in my life.
I could go through your list and provide a counterpoint for each “con” but the last time I wrote about this subject I got accused of saying things I did not say and implying things I did not imply, so let’s just say that my feelings on the matter are very different to yours.
ETA: I do, however, buy audio CDs.
I bought one audio CD recently because it contained music I couldn’t find on iTunes, or any other online source.
I bought an audio CD box set of an opera recently because I wanted the libretto that came with it.
Other than that I haven’t bought CDs in a few years.
OK. You made decisions in situation X and then the situation changed. This is worth a gripe and asking around for other people’s experiences to see if they match yours is a reasonable and possibly valuable thing. Cool.
It also sounds like you had a lot more media than I’ve ever had, and that maybe you told yourself that you weren’t indulging that much when you made a purchase, because you could always sell a few if the budget started pinching. It’s got to feel like someone stole your budget buffer. But now you know not to tell yourself that.
Even with cars. It’s good to consider the resale value when deciding which make and model to purchase. It’s bad to consider the resale value when deciding how much to spend. For budgeting purposes, assume that the car will eventually be worthless because someone invented a cheap hovercar.
As to my experience with media. When I was a kid they didn’t call it media. People had records. The choice was stereo or hi-fi. And kids’ records were purchased, then played until they were scratched, bent, or broken into unplayability. Then they were thrown out with sad little talks about treating things carefully so that they would last.
My first records were 78s. I’ve been through all the changes and I’ve never bought something that I didn’t want to keep indefinitely. I’ve still got the Willipuss Wallipuss record somewhere. I tried to put off buying any CDs when they came out, because I assumed that music would be migrating to the computer soon anyway. I may have a few dozen, but about half of those were given to me. Also by the time CDs came out I had decided that if you bought something, you’d just have to dust it.
Being old and approaching geezerhood, I remember when people expected computers to hold their value, what with them being so expensive that a lot of people couldn’t afford new ones. Those people were grateful to be able to buy a five year old computer at more than half its original price while you upgraded to something even more expensive. Once. For a shining moment.
All in all, thanks for the thread. It’s interesting reading everyone’s take on the subject.
Investment?? Most of my CDs were purchased at steep discounts in used music stores or from Amazon secondary sellers, for less than I would’ve paid for downloads. I bought them for the music, not in the expectation that I’d make gobs of money from them once they appreciated in value.
Yes.
It’s painful to think of reloading all those CDs, cassettes and LPs back into Itunes if there’s a catastrophic software/hardware event and all my backups fail. But I’ll be able to do it if need be.
Just picked up some CDs via Amazon, actually. Some used stuff like Opal’s Happy Nightmare Baby and The Reivers’ Pop Beloved that are out of print and not super-easy to find locally. I don’t think I have any digitized music :). Heck I even have a few cassettes of hard to find stuff that I listen to. I’ll admit the vinyl has gone into storage, though.
Other than space, I have no real need to get rid of my CDs. Musically they work just fine and unlike the cassettes, they haven’t yet degraded with age. I don’t use ( and never have ) a portable music player of any sort, as I find them distracting. And I don’t really give a crap what they’re worth. I don’t anticipate needing the money they would bring at any time in my life.
Same thing with books. I could see migrating to a Kindle if I traveled more, but so far it hasn’t been a pressing issue and I enjoy books for tactile reasons.
About the only digital media I have started using regularly is downloaded games, mostly because changing times have forced me to and Netflix streaming. I do see physical media disappearing some day or at least being regulated to collectors. But at this point I feel no need to start getting rid of stuff and I’m still buying.
Because the notion of reselling the unit is built into the car industry. The same is not true of media.
I paid $50 bucks or so for my favorite copy of Lord of the Rings. I don’t care if it’s not resellable at a profit, or even at anything near what I paid for it, because I don’t intend to resell it in the first place.
Like other posters, I think you’re confused about the nature of entertainment media. They are expenditures, not investments.