Updated Aug. 25
Although we now live in a digital world of downloaded and streamed music and video, the lure of what the entertainment industry calls “physical product” seems to be remarkably enduring.
The Washington Post’s Zoe Glasser reports that Gen Z consumers – people born in the late 1990s and early 2000s – are newly drawn to compact discs, while The Post’s Herb Scribner reports that Netflix will send customers a grab-bag of DVDs for old times’ sake before exiting the the video disc-rental market this fall.
One Taylor Swift fan profiled by Glasser collects the CDs not to play – she listens to the singer’s streams – but as objects “more akin to merchandise than a functional tool for consuming music.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/2023/08/19/gen-z-collectors-love-the-cd/
Netflix’s DVD swan-song comes with a catch, Scribner writes. “[T]he company told subscribers this week that they can opt into receiving up to 10 extra DVDs chosen by the company (and slightly based on the customer’s queue of desired movies);” but, because Netflix could be sued for giving away film-makers’ property, the discs must be returned:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2023/08/21/netflix-dvds-free-giveaway
While the DVD (sort of) giveaway is a nostalgic gesture, the CD boomlet isn’t – the Taylor Swift fan is 23, far too young to remember when discs were the dominant medium for recorded music. “CDs make up a tiny percentage of the music industry’s earnings: about 3 percent as of 2022, down from 96 percent in 2002,” Glasser reports. “Digital streaming services have dominated for more than a decade, with vinyl ticking upward year over year” since the early 2000s.
Both articles point to a continuing desire by consumers to possess a physical, as opposed to a purely digital, version of their favorite music or video. That desire contributed to the renaissance of vinyl records, which began about 20 years ago, and to a more recent (albeit much smaller) renewal of interest in cassette tapes.
Collectors of classical recordings, an older cohort of the music market, have held onto CDs longer than younger fry, partly out of habit and to continue using playback equipment that sounds better than earbuds or devices’ speakers, partly because downloads are often chopped into musical segments that don’t reassemble properly on playback. (Try to find a download of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony that doesn’t “stutter” sonically between the third movement and the finale.)
The “merchandise” aspect is a significant draw, too: Physical discs may not be as enticing or functional as, say, T-shirts; but they have cover art, essentially miniature posters for the artist, the music or the film. Some people collect LPs for their covers, not as recordings to play. The marketers of downloads, aware of the visual attraction, commonly include a digital file of the album cover that can be printed.
Then there’s durability: If all your music is stored digitally, and the device on which it’s stored crashes or is misplaced, your collection is gone. That’s why I make a digital copy or burn a CD of every download I purchase. (I usually skip printing the album art, which lost much of its creative potential when the frame shrank from the LP’s 12-by-12 inches to the CD’s 5-by-5.)
Bottom line: The point of owning a recording is to play it repeatedly. The most desirable medium is one that lasts on repeated playback. That at least partially explains why LPs made a comeback, and why CDs haven’t been obliterated by downloads or streaming.
UPDATE: The New York Times’ Reggie Ugwu reports that Netflix will allow recipients of DVDs to keep them. “[T]hey could also request up to 10 more movies by mail as part of an everything-must-go deal.”
Letter V 