Why I Still Love Physical Media……

The year is 1981. It’s Friday and it’s payday. I’m 19 years old and i have a whole weeks wages burning a hole in my pocket. My first thought upon recieveing what seemed like a kings ransom, was to head straight into the town to browse and treat myself to one of the latest chart LPs, maybe a book, and of course a VHS movie. Then it’s time to head on down to Guild Street to check out what’s showing at my local cinema, The Burton Odeon. My life at this time revolved around music and movies.

Fast forward 40 years and the collection i’d started to build up all those years ago, now amounts to a vast amount of physical media, most of which i still have today. This is where my love of physical media began and still continues to this day.

I still cannot bear the thought of getting rid of any of the vinyl albums, singles, VHS tapes, DVDs and blurays i have, even though i’ve been promising myself for many years, i would at least try to thin out the collection, beginning with some of the many titles i bought blind, years and sometimes decades ago, and haven’t yet got around to watching. I think part of the reason i haven’t yet made proper inroads to this huge task, is that i still get a real kick out of browsing my shelves and storage boxes, to find something to watch.

Aside from that though, is the thought of having purchased a movie on Prime Video, that it can be taken off me at any time. Apparently if the rights to that movie expire from Prime, or any other streaming platform, the movie can literally just disappear from my library, as if it were never there, and that worries me.

Nowadays, the only time i’m usually tempted to purchase a movie from any streaming platform, is if that movie is ultra rare and not available on any physical media that i know of, that way i know this is the only way i’m going to be able to watch the film, until at such time it gets an official release on either DVD or Bluray. At the present time i think i have about six, or maybe seven movies, purchased from Amazon Prime, and i make a point of every now and then checking to make sure they are still there.

I don’t have that issue with physical media. They sit on my shelf, or in a storage box until i decide to sit down and watch them. This is why i still love physical media, and i will probably never stop collecting the various formats, and on that subject i’m hearing VHS is making a comeback, and as we all know the vinyl market exploded again quite a while ago. Is it just me or do we always end up coming back to what should never have been let go in the first place??? Any thoughts you guys have, feel free to drop them in the comments below. Hope you enjoyed my article and thanks for taking the time to read it.