Just wanted to post about a little survey I took today on my Amazon echo. The survey question was do you purchase physical media?

No - 68%
Yes - 31%

I didn't know what to think about the responses. What do you all think?

I think it's missing one percent.
And I must know what that means! 1% undecided? 1% confused by the question? 1% feel it's none of your business?
I wish I knew what was going on here.

I can say that the breakdown you received is actually higher in support of physical media than I would've expected. Most people I talk to stopped buying it years ago and cannot fathom why I still support it.

I've always bought and will always buy physical media. I don't trust anything else, and when they stop making CD's, Blu-Ray discs and DVD's I'll stop buying stuff completely.

Physical. Media. Always.

Posted this story upstairs - my daughter and son-in-law are in the process of moving into a new townhouse. Last week my daughter texted me and said, "I know I'm probably asking the wrong person, but is there any point in moving my DVD collection?"

Answer - absolutely. Never have to worry about who has the streaming rights to what you want to watch. Never have to worry about episodes being dropped or edited. Plus, her collection is nowhere near as big as her father's.

Fast-forward to Friday - the movers moved more stuff than anticipated, so they were staying at the new place. They won't have internet there until later this week. I was watching TV, and my wife walked in and said, "Can you pause that? You need to hear this." She held up the phone, and my daughter said, in a defeated tone, "You were right." They were getting ready to watch something on DVD, which they wouldn't have had otherwise. She actually gave me her Blu-Ray player last year (she was going to toss it before I said I'd take it), so they were using a PlayStation.

A lesser man might have gloated, but I am a lesser man - I gloated.

I also believe that the number for physical media is higher than I expected. I'll leave the missing one percent to a rounding error.

I think it would have been helpful to ask the age of each of your respondents, as age has a lot to do with this.

There's people like me, born a whole bunch of years ago (boomer) who started out with physical media, as it was all that was available, and after building a rather sizable record collection looked upon CDs and eventually DVDs as the answer from above that we had truly entered the space age and have since built up a massive amount of those shiny five inch discs and I'm never going back, as hard as that has become. (I think that's a run on sentence)

There's millennials and Gen X who sort of border that time where LP's were hard but not impossible to find and they found themselves purchasing Audio Cassettes for gosh sakes and, after a short dip into the CD pool have dusted off the turntable and moved on to expanding the record collection.

And there's today's Gen whatevers who are either buying LPs or downloading their music, probably more of the latter.

And let's not forget the music industry themselves who have apparently decided for their pocketbooks that LPs are what's selling today and that they can make real money moving back (on?) to LPs..

For nostalgia reasons I remain on the Tower Records mailing list, which of course is all LP's and I recognize everything more than ten years old they sell on LP, having previously owned it on LP and then re-bought on CD.

I know this is sort of a sloppy breakdown but I hope it makes some sense. And, I have what was once a very expense Empire turntable in a closet in my home, where it has remained for the most part since the early 1980's.

Thanks for listening.

All I know is, I can still watch the Michael Jackson episode of The Simpsons on my DVD set.

People who sold or never had the DVDs and stream the show on Disney Plus don't have that option.

Same thing for a handful of Scrubs episodes where J.D. was made up to look like Turk. And I'm not sure if the Seinfeld ep w/the Puerto Rican flag is on streaming or not, but I haven't seen it pop up on TV in syndication.

Exactly. I'm not interested in having stuff censored.

I still buy physical media, but very selectively. I buy music CDs and music related Blu ray/DVD's. I no longer buy movies and TV shows on physical media. I find I have more movies that I have yet to watch and end up not putting them in the player. I have all of the tv shows I want on DVD and Blu ray. Ever since I quit cable and joined tv streaming services I have found the selection excellent and have gravitated toward that. I had the crappiest internet and ridiculously priced basic extended cable. Now I have more of a selection at a much better price. I also have to admit I stream more music now than I play my tons of physical CDs. My favorite artists won't have to worry. I'll always buy their music, but honestly there is not much output from them any more. Who knows maybe music I love will make a comeback and I'll have new artists to discover.

I'll likely always be a physical media guy - even if I digitize a chunk of my music collection, if it's important enough for me to own, I want to own it physically. bad things happen to computers, and while it doesn't happen as often, failures are more catastrophic.

Don't get me started on streaming as a sole content source. I have avoided all streaming services except Amazon as a byproduct of my Prime account. The idea of having to maintain a subscription to keep access to your libraries and playlists is just insane. If I used media more disposably, I'd probably have 3-4 services, but I don't.

The one downside with physical media I have is that I've usually watched movies I buy on DVD a couple of times on Crave (Canada's movie service on TV and tied to HBO), so most of my movies are basically insurance if the mode ever strikes again after they're not available there anymore. But Crave has lost most major releases to one streaming service or another, so the movie quality has declined.

I love physical media, been buying since 1972 and have a massive collection (just ask my wife) but as I get older and because of technology, I also love streaming music and movies. It is fantastic to have almost every album available 24/7 wherever I am (on the road or at the gym).
I mean much of the music is available in Lossless and Dolby Atmos so no real deterioration of quality using good equipment.
We live in wonderful times. Far from that AM/FM transistor radio I started with at 11 years old.

I showed my wife a video and said it reminded me of her. A woman said it was the saddest day of her life because her husband said he wanted a divorce. Off camera, the husband yells, "That's not what I said!"
She yells back, "Then what did you say?" He says, "I said you don't need to go to Barnes and Noble, you need to read some of the books you already have on the shelves." She said, "Same thing!"

Almost every time I get a CD or book in the mail, my wife says, "Oh, thank goodness. I was afraid you were going to run out of stuff to listen to/read."

Okay, so I'm a little behind on both.

I still buy a considerable amount of physical media.

Really have slowed down big time on buying CDs...only because most of what I want I've got and it's pretty rare that I hear a new artist these days that I can really get into.

Still buying boatload of movies on Blu-ray and 4K disks.

I said it in the other thread upstairs, but I have a few streaming subscriptions and also buy my own stuff physically when it's really important to me. Then I rip it to a drive and stream it anywhere I want to using Plex, so I have the best of both worlds. A bonus is any physical media is only used the one time to rip it, so it's always in pristine shape should I need it for something.

One thing that slowed down the CD purchases is the now lack of portability, used to have CD players in cars and you had CD Discman’s when you were out but then they debuted the IPOD (game changer).

So I once had a lot of CDs in the car but no more. Streaming from my phone via Bluetooth is the new way.

but don't you miss listening to your own homemade productions?

Nah that so 1990s or 2000s if you include Jimbo’s CD comps. No point of going through that hassle when you can make any playlist on Apple Music and then it’s available quickly.

I once was the king of cassette comps for my friends in Queens in the late 70s early 80s but that ship also sailed a long time ago.

i often wonder how jimbo would have done with streaming.

That is true about the ability to play music in cars. My last 2 cars I leased. I had a usb for music. So, I made a bunch of files on usb for my car music. Of course, technology changed again. The next car (2024 model) has the usb-c for music. So I had to get another usb drive that had dual usb and usb-c to put my music on. No telling what will be the next configuration for music in autos.

The actual band themselves playing in your car, but miniature versions that stand on your dashboard.

Still buying physical media like crazy. CDs, LPs, DVDs, Blu-Rays

I don't mind downloads. I can always burn them to a CD-R.

Streaming music- no thanks. Boring.

Streaming TV/Movies- BritBox is the only one I subscribe to that doesn't have commercials. I pay for commercial free Prime Video but not the others. Which is why I only subscribe when there are special deals and then I take the cheap commercial way, much as I hate it. I'll be getting rid of HBO/Max soon. Watch what I want to see and discontinue it.Commercial streaming services only leads me to buy more DVDs/Blu-Rays while missing the days of the video stores