Overlooked reasons to still buy physical media

When I want to purchase books, comics, music, etc., I steer clear from anything with DRM that can only be decrypted by a proprietary service. For books and comics, I would rather be able to obtain an EPUB that I can load directly on any device I own, and when it is simply impossible to do so (e.g. Book Walker or Kindle DRM), then I buy physical copies and avoid digital copies entirely. I don't care if I pay a marginally higher cost, because I see value in being able to take the book with me anywhere. Likewise, for music, I would much rather pay $1 on Bandcamp for some FLAC file than pay $10/month in perpetuity for temporary access to said song (which can be revoked at any time). And if that is impossible, then I check if there is a CD I can purchase and, if not, then simply avoid paying money.

The ownership of a physical game is tied to a physical token (the disk or cartridge) not an account on some server that can be closed or locked whenever for whatever reason. Nintendo actually ties a digital game to an account AND a device. My son got locked out of his Sony account forever, for a reason I’ve never been able to find out, and getting a human on the phone is not possible.

I’ve had so many problems trying to play digital games I’ve paid for. Physical always works, and sure, I probably need the internet, but I don’t need an account.

I have floppy disc copies of the original Civilization, Master of Orion and Alpha Centauri, presumably somewhere in storage, that I spent $60 each on back in the '90s. But I've also spent the $5 to buy digital copies from Steam, GoG, etc. so that I can actually play them today. I wouldn't have the first idea how to proceed in getting a 5 1/4" floppy up and running these days.

Same for music. I have a cassette tape of AC/DC's Back in Black. And a CD. And an iTunes download. No idea where, but I paid real money for each of them and thus, presumably, own them. In the car, I stream it from Apple Music. Just last night I was practicing guitar so I played it off Youtube, which appears to be the fastest way to get music to come out of a computer these days.

So yeah, when I pull out the old CD collection, I look back fondly to being able to rattle through them in the center console of the car and swap in a new one without ever taking my eyes off the road. (and having it actually play instead of invent some new form of bluetooth/cell communication error).

But in practice, I don't have a single cd in the car.

Physical games are cheaper if you buy used.

Also, second hand, Blu Rays cost less than buying the media from an online marketplace.

Also, collecting and hunting for specific physical releases is a nice hobby.

When the first Kindle came out in 2006, the marketing indicated that e-books would be cheaper than paperbacks, for the same reason a 12-track album on iTunes was $12 instead of $18.99 for the CD. So you would put up the DRM and Amazon's remote deletion features for potentially lower prices.

Almost 20 years later, this has not borne out as planned. Ebooks are almost the same price as paperbacks! In some cases, a new paperback is cheaper $12 than the Kindle version ($14.99), such as the Theranos expose book Bad Blood:

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=bad+blood+book&crid=3J4CU652CO2WM...

For example, if you're a hobbyist musician, then it's pretty favourable economics to put your songs on a CD, go out busking on the street, and sell the CD. The CD is a perpetual license to play the music as many times as you want, whenever you want, including the right to lend it to other people, pass it on to your children as part of an inheritance or otherwise, etc. etc.

So that's just about the widest possible legal right that the artist can possibly give to the listener, and, consequently, it should also command the highest possible price. You can charge, say, $10 for the CD, as opposed to, say, receiving $0.01 (don't know what the actual number would be), on each streaming-play of one of your songs.

Dealing in the wider right is much more advantageous to the artist who is low on capital: They've had an up-front cost in creating the music and recording the CD, and selling CDs will amortize that investment a lot quicker than selling streaming-plays. Streaming plays may pay more dividends later, if the music gets listened to a lot for a long period of time, but the redistribution of that cashflow towards the earliest possible point in time is financially much more advantageous.

So, if you have listeners paying for streaming plays, and artists requiring the largest possible payment at the earliest possible time, you require some moneybags intermediary to convert the one kind of cashflow into the other, and that opens the door to everyone getting ripped off in the process.

Obviously, one could interject that this is talking about the buy vs. rent distinction rather than the physical vs. download/streaming distinction. You could imagine the artist selling MP3s from their website through a paywall and charging for it as if it was a CD. But that opens problems on the listener's side, in the sense that it creates overhead and friction to look after an MP3 collection well.

But those two things are highly interdependent: Physical media is the technology that pretty much makes it the most frictionless on both sides of the transaction for customers to collect and use media over large time horizons. Once you walk down the path of download/streaming, you get into the territory where the thing you need to provide to the customer in order to exercise their legal right starts looking more like a service and less like a product, opening a whole can of worms and changing the economics fundamentally.

Digital has made the user experience better and provides more revenue to developers and platform holders. It's a win win for everyone involved.