Let's Get Physical

Physical media has its advantages if that’s the only place you can find the artwork in question. Our house is crammed with records, CDs, books, comic books and DVDs that we’ve collected over the years and decades. Much of this we’ve digitized but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t come in handy when there’s a glitch in the matrix and you lose access to the digital world.

The latest glitch is in my ancient car, in which the auxiliary jack for the stereo no longer works. I’ve tried different cables but none of them work, so it’s a problem with the stereo, and it’s not worth getting the stereo fixed because the car is on its way out. This means I can’t listen to music on my iPod or iPhone, so I’m stuck with CDs and the radio.

It hasn’t been all bad, since I dug out some old mix CDs and such and have been able to listen to some songs I never digitized. I’m glad I kept these since the car is where I listen to most of my music and without anything to listen to, I would only hear my aggravated profanity and the bile coursing through my system during my hateful commute. The radio is OK but it gets old. I listen to Oldies 98 now since I’m old and the station has finally caught up to the ‘80s music I loved. This is a deep irony since I was livid in 1987 when 98 stopped playing top 40 music. Another irony is that the station is just as repetitive as it was in the ‘80s, which I don’t understand. They used to be bound to play whatever was popular but now they have a whole decade-plus to work from, and they still play the same stuff way too often for no reason.

I experienced another good reason to keep CDs when Prince died. At the time, his music was only on certain streaming services and I don’t think you could download it everywhere. None of his albums had been remastered so only the originals were available to buy. So there was a scramble for people to play his music but I already had it all so I only had to push play. We keep all our records, of course, but records have aesthetic pleasures and better sound quality so there are reasons for keeping those beyond just access. This is why I’m not interested in streaming unless everything breaks down and I have no choice: I already painstakingly collected and paid for all this music so I don’t want to do it all again. 

I think it’s also important to hang onto DVDs and blu-rays if you can because TV and movies could disappear from streaming services, and that’s outside of our control. I was just reading an article saying that since Disney bought Fox, Disney has been putting old Fox movies into a vault, so people won’t have access to a lot of horror and classic movies. Netflix isn’t great about carrying older movies so many will be inaccessible without physical media. We have a lot of TV shows on DVD and I’m hanging onto them. I like to rewatch quality TV and you never know when they’ll stop streaming.

If your home doesn’t have much storage space, I can understand getting rid of stuff. We’re lucky enough to have room, so what’s the harm in hanging onto physical media in case we need it?