Rolling Death Of Physical Media

Because it's coming.

Sony to cut ~250 jobs from its recordable media manufacturing hub in Japan. That's 250 out of fewer than 700 employees. Also, "The electronics and entertainment conglomerate will also gradually cease production of optical disc storage media products, including Blu-ray discs, according to the sources."

Oh for fun. (But since I mostly buy Blu-rays from specialty imprints I am not immediately perturbed.)

I guess the big question is, where do the small boutique labels get their stuff pressed? Do they use the same plants as the huge megacorps? I can only speak for what my label does — we put our orders through a company in NYC (A to Z Media; they're not perfect — they didn't shrink-wrap our last two releases — but they're relatively cheap, and easy to communicate with) but the actual CDs are manufactured in the Czech Republic.

I've worked with this place and they generally have a great reputation

https://copycatsmedia.com/

wouldn't that be like blank DVD-R disc manufacturing, though, rather than replication?

the sony layoff, I mean

Correct.

do we have a thread on building a good digital collection or have i asked this already

There’s an ILM thread but specifically on music not movies:

Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

The musicians I know swear by https://www.kunaki.com/ .

thks

i have that thread saved ned! an autumn project maybe

I’m kinda amazed we haven’t had this thread for years now

we have

but the copyright owners keep releasing changes

My formal digital movie collection as such isn’t much — a bunch of redeemed coupons and a few direct purchased here or there when I realized there was some sort of deal happening. The nicest setup might be A24 where if you buy a physical movie from their shop and you have an account they give you full streaming access as well. I do have a clutch of random rips a friend gave me from the 2000s but most of the digital movie/TV/etc collection otherwise is MST3K-and-related or Prince.

Because it's coming.

lol you doomsayers have been pulling this routine for a quarter of a century now. no, it isn't. it'll always be here. its scale will wax and wane. that's literally all.

i notice at least on the underground level more bands having CDs for sale, or even cdrs with very elaborate homemade artwork, feels like the cassette thing has crested

i dont have anything on wane, any recs

i know this is about music and visual media but just another example: ebooks will never ever take over print, imo

what can i say, people like objects

Who care, soon the computers will just be able to create sgt peppers from scratch exactly how you remembered it, or with brown sound drums, or Bernie Worrel keyboard stabs

Me: I lost my cd of Revolver.

T2000: here I recreated it and took out the shitty Paul stuff and created 5 more really great John songs

i have about a thousand dvds i haven't watched and 2000+ CDs and a thousand books i haven't read and about 5000 records and uh a record store and am officially ready for the death of all media. i don't think i need anymore. i think i'm good. getting to the point where if i read something or listen to something or watch something i just put it in the store to sell when i'm done.
eventually, i'll get rid of it all. i don't do online/cloud. i've never uploaded or burned a movie or a cd in my life. i have zero music saved on my computer. i think i could live completely with streaming services and youtube and a choice selection of records and be fine. and when the power goes off for good i'm gonna learn how to play the sackbut or something.
i'm at that age where less is looking a whole lot better than more.
and i certainly don't care if they ever make another new CD or DVD or record. there are so many good old ones i haven't seen or heard. all that plastic...seems archaic somehow. but yeah people like to get ahold of stuff. i'm no different. but i don't need a lot of new stuff. i can go a calendar year without ever stepping foot in anything other than a grocery store, restaurant, or used record/book store. and 90% of those places are within walking distance of my house.
i will buy some new metal records on occasion online. but those are the only new records i get. and i do buy some new books from my friend raymond. he's two doors down on my street. i only buy books from him now. he's so nice.

https://roundaboutbookstore.com/

i gave ray 1000+ 45s for his media sale next week! he does one a month. sells a ton of CDs and DVDs for a dollar apiece. well, two dollars on friday and one dollar on saturday and sunday. i've probably given him about 200 moving boxes of records in the last year for his sale. stuff i don't need. some good stuff too! people dig it. i want his store to do well. he also has huge gaylords of books for 50 cents apiece. people go nuts for those. climbing inside the crates. good stuff in there too. stop by some month. tell him i sent you.

https://scontent-bos5-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-6/448832222_865804492250801_8499658241283548920_n.jpg?_nc_cat=106&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=75d36f&_nc_ohc=WPzMBxMGpUgQ7kNvgEy8uL9&_nc_ht=scontent-bos5-1.xx&oh=00_AYCKVBr2h6hRhYux6AxINPHpHwBx4sPGwCRBAkd_hWmLGg&oe=6687BCE0

The implications of the death of physical media wouldn't be quite so dire if the state of streaming media were less of a complete shitshow. I was just yesterday scrolling through a chronological list of movies available on Max, which is actually quite good through like the early '70s but their catalog from the last half century (aside from some high-profile new releases) is jaw-droppingly awful. Like basically the equivalent of one of those free streaming services that abruptly drop loud, bleating commercials into the movie at seven minute intervals.

So yeah, I'll just continue to stick with my gargantuan collection of Blus and DVDs and trust that the boutiques will continue to churn out a ton of appealing product while the big boys run into the same wall over and over. For instance, didn't Disney learn some kind of lesson after getting their lunch handed to them for going all-in on streaming (well, Disney Movie Club just shuttered, so I think I know the answer to that question)?

I don’t have any more room in my flat, I just want a karagarga invite 🥺

I will take some of your stuff off you to make space

"(aside from some high-profile new releases) is jaw-droppingly awful."

Amazon Prime has to be the worst service for movies. i've been using my kid's account to watch The Expanse (and Bosch) and every time i scroll through their stuff i can't believe how dreck-y it is. I remember it being better for quirky older titles years ago but yuck who would want to sift through that crap now.

My virtue signaling for the day; i have never ever ever bought anything from Amazon in my life. i can't stand their online site. i can't even look at it.

i don't go to the movies and i don't go on vacation and i don't buy new stuff (every few years i go to the Tractor Supply or the Farmer's Co-op in town for some new shirts/socks/underwear.) so streaming services are my big leisure expense for the year. i'm a little extreme. i don't know what it runs me. probably a couple thousand dollars. i justify it because i don't drink or smoke anymore. i don't even want to think about what i used to spend on cigarettes and wine. but the streaming has definitely made me more ready for a less physical reality.

i did get rid of Max though! i pay way too much for Hulu. i got live Hulu so that my dad could watch live news and with everything else (no commercials, Disney+, ESPN+, Paramount+ with Showtime) its about $100 a month. And I pay for Netflix, Criterion Channel, Mubi, Ovid, PBS Passport (that's only $5 a month...), Peacock, Acorn, Britbox, MHz Choice + Topic, Shudder...i think that's it. Someone pays for Crunchyroll, but i don't think its me. I should get rid of Shudder. I will watch maybe 1 or 2 movies a month on there.
Oh and i pay for Youtube Premium which i use more than anything else. or more hours a day per month. I have Spotify on my tv via a family account but i never use it. like, never ever.

and that is how much it takes a person to forget that they no longer get drunk and smoke cigarettes to dull the pain of existence.

Thread got dark.

In my experience, Prime/Freevee is actually one of the best streamers re: catalogue. In the past couple months they've featured a number of Universal-era Sirks, lots of deep-cut MGM titles, and the early Marx Bros. films. Actually finding these things can be a problem, thanks to the algorithms. I've been lucky in that regard, since I mainly just use them for films, so I get a lot of them up on my mainpage.

Also ads on Prime has been a nothingburger for me: I generally get around 2 minutes at the beginning of a film, and in very occasional cases maybe another equally short break a third or halfway in.

is everything on freevee on prime? i always think of them as separate things.

I don't think Prime is all bad either. The Sirk series is terrific.

tubi is my free streamer of choice for oddities. though the roku freerise channels are also good. darkroom is likewise a good roku free option.

i didn't say that prime is ALL bad. just underwhelming given the fact that its owned by the richest person in the galaxy. its also the only streamer that gives me problems tech-wise.

i have to remind myself that there is a movie on shudder that my brother-in-law edited and that i haven't seen but i really don't like mosquitos...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1y_vcmRuI4

is everything on freevee on prime? i always think of them as separate things.

Freevee stuff is featured on the Prime mainpage (it's collapsed into your membership), and--if IMDB is to be believed--there are some films & shows featured on both sites. Freevee has its own website but most of their content (bar some of their channels, I think?) is accessible via Prime. There are some MGM movies that constantly bounce between Prime, Freevee, and MGM+ (talk about a useless streamer!).

featured on both sites SIMULTANEOUSLY, that is.

okay, yeah, i guess i just think of freevee as its own thing like tubi. they do feature things that you don't see elsewhere. i'll betcha different people run freevee. prime itself though i never need to see anything on it.

you don't even need to be a prime member to watch freevee on its own. hence the name.

last time I got a free trial of Prime, anything I actually wanted to watch you had to pay extra for, seemed really shit tbh

I cancelled Netflix after they removed the Basic package. that was the only streaming service I had, most of it just seems like a waste of time, if I want to watch something (which isn't that often tbf) I'll just torrent it, fuck em

I appreciate the Dr Who channel on Pluto

I didn't watch anything on Prime for quite awhile, but they have the Expanse and Fallout and the Boys at least.

i think i get every dr. who on britbox. i attempted to start at the beginning at one point - maybe during the pandemic - and didn't get far. i left them with the cavemen and daleks. that show is always kinda frightening to me. like a bad dream.

yeah!! Garishly nightmarish in a good deep way, I’ve just been watching them in the semi-random order they broadcast them in

Sapphire & Steel is on Tubi, any other Americans looking for weird 80s British stuff

are books physical media? I buy a lot of books, they seem to be doing just fine

I buy books for a living, and none of them are physical

Tubi is vastly overrated for movies if you have Kanopy.

"Sapphire & Steel is on Tubi, any other Americans looking for weird 80s British stuff"

i actually own the dvd set! which is a weird thing to own.

i have never read an e-book. or i-book. or digi-book or whatever. i have never listened to a book either. on tape or cd or computer. i'm old-fashioned that way.

I bought around 50 books/CDs/DVDs at the yearly town sale this past week. I won't live long enough for physical media to disappear; the secondary market in all its various guises will be around longer--probably much longer--than I am.

I know it's bad of me and I hope physical media keeps on going for other people but I'm content to be digital. Moving boxes and boxes of books once a year sucked, I tossed all my CD jewel cases and put them in binders (before I gave them all away), my habit of buying DVDs or Blu-Rays and then just rewatching the X-Files or something was pretty shameful.

I do sometimes contemplate starting to collect old pulp paperbacks, all the old editions of Jim Thompson and Raymond Chandler I can find, weird Frank Frazetta fantasy covers.

The last vinyl I bought was Katie Alice Greer's solo album off Bandcamp, it arrived the week my turntable stopped working and I haven't bought another one. It would be cool to get a SL1200 for sampling and go crate digging... but there are no dollar vinyl options around me, Half Price Books thinks all twelve copies of Whipped Cream & Other Delights they've got on hand are worth $10 each and the dedicated record stores are crazier.

at my store in philly in the 90s i sold bootleg vhs tapes of japanese laserdiscs.

Jodorowsky, right? Every boot of El Topo et al. back then came from Japanese laserdiscs. You could tell because they blurred all the genitals.

How did this thread go all day without anyone asking scott how many books are in a gaylord

because we wpuld all ofc realise it depends on the books

it depends on the gaylord

lol

My Kanopy subscription through my university sucks so bad.

How so?

Kanopy is different depending on the library. Mine only purchases films that are being used for classes.

SOUNDS LIKE A RACKET. WHO IS THIS KANOPY AND WHAT IS BIG LIBRARY HIDING???

ah okay. its owned by Rakuten. better than Amazon? you be the judge.

It's basically a service for libraries. I don't know if you can compare it to other streamers.

I don't use a textbook in my film class -- I have videos and designed my own PowerPoint slides -- so I force students to subscribe to the Criterion Channel. I know full well they've torrented their whole lives, so I stress that however they wanna cheat the system is fine with me.

I used to have it through the Manhattan (plus Bronx and Staten Island technically) library and the Queens library but Manhattan canceled it because I think they charge the libraries a pretty penny, so now I only get it through the other one and the selection is okay but kind of limited.

My library licensed about 600 Criterion films through Kanopy, so I don't subscribe to the Channel.

"It's basically a service for libraries. I don't know if you can compare it to other streamers."

i was just curious who owned it.

I'm not sure which Kanopy level our library subscribes to, but it has a ton of good and interesting movies. I watch almost as much from there as from Criterion. Just watched "Tangerine" and "I Do Not Care if We Go Down in History as Barbarians" via Kanopy in the last month.

So I hit up the new B&N, and...it's nice(?). Smaller, but also less hoity-toity than B&N's of yore. Really feels like a vintage Borders, with shelves dancing in every direction. The newsstand is packed, seems like they're carrying every remaining print magazine. Lots of vinyl, maybe more new stock than some area record stores. CDs & DVD/BLU/4K another story. If you want something that's not Criterion or a major studio release, you're SOL. I don't think I even saw any Arrow stuff. CDs are next to them, spines out on a single tall rack. Pour one out for Bonamassa: no titles at his most reliable outlet. No bargain assortments either, a saving grace in the past (I got so much cool shit from their $5 bins in the before times).*

*After typing that, I checked again, and they have a cheapie section that's poorly demarcated and organized.

shelves dancing facing

Instead of Kanopy our library has Hoopla, which appears to be a combination of a low-rent documentary streaming service and one of the less Roku channels.

lesser

i think i get every dr. who on britbox. i attempted to start at the beginning at one point - maybe during the pandemic - and didn't get far. i left them with the cavemen and daleks. that show is always kinda frightening to me. like a bad dream.

― scott seward

everybody wants to start at the beginning with doctor who, for the love of god if you're watching doctor who _don't start at the beginning_. old doctor who isn't that kind of show.

what can i say, people like objects

― ivy.

jackie treehorn treats objects like people!

eventually, i'll get rid of it all. i don't do online/cloud. i've never uploaded or burned a movie or a cd in my life. i have zero music saved on my computer. i think i could live completely with streaming services and youtube and a choice selection of records and be fine. and when the power goes off for good i'm gonna learn how to play the sackbut or something.

― scott seward

just don't break your glasses. that's all i can say.

but no like the idea of _owning_ stuff, the older i get the less it means to me. i've tried to figure out how to put my writing in the cloud from my nas and i can't do it, all it does is creates copies of every single file in my subfolders in my root directory which is _not_ what i want... my greatest worry is losing all of that, all of the writing i've done. cuz my memory ain't so good. and photos, i guess. i somehow have 38 GB of personal photos. how do i have 38 GB of personal photos? idk.

all of my like "rare" shit? nah. i got more shit than i can find, i got more shit than i can remember, and i mean, it's fine because life is endless novelty now. it's not about _possession_, it's about _experience_. experience is ephemeral. life is ephemeral. i'm glad i have a NAS because i'm a hoarder, a digital hoarder. if it wasn't for that black box in the corner of my living room i'd wind up being crushed to death by a stack of falling newspapers i'd never read.

the main thing i think about now is what happens to all of the _stuff_ i've collected when i die. probably nothing. probably nobody cares. i mean nobody has the access password but me, and i can't even remember the access password. security!

I do salute B&N’s continuing commitment to magazines.

But then I remember that for years they had an outlet in Baltimore’s inner harbor that was three stories tall, with a mind-bending selection of magazines, comparatively. R.I.P. that place, which I never got to spend enough time in.

Also, their current CD section is awesome if what you want are Taylor Swift albums

<SAD BONAMASSA JPG>

There’s a B&N next to where I work that used to have a pretty huge magazine section. Now it’s about half the size of a 90s grocery store magazine rack.

I'm curious now to check out some of the surviving older locations in the area and see what they're like these days. But then I remember two of the three closest ones to me are in mall/shopping plazas that are a pain in the ass to park at, and the third is suburban one that's out of the way for anything else I'd wanna do except maybe eating at a Cracker Barrel or something.

Wow, checking out reviews on that third one on Google maps, and one of the first ones to pop up is somebody showing off a COVID truther book with a foreword by RFK Jr.

Have we every done a musical format poll?

That'd be interesting. Vinyl, CDs, cassettes, streaming, mp3s...would anything else be worth including? (Or did you mean just physical formats?)

shellac, reels, 8-track, minidisc, DAT, USB drive, after that I think we'd be good? idk maybe wax cylinders, I do actually know someone with a player

Apparently the Japanese government have finally eradicated the parts of legislation mandating the use of floppy disks for various record keeping purposes, eleven years after Sony made its last floppy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UA93R_mOSng

Geez, I remember having to flip double sided floppy disks back in the day, I guess that qualifies me for the age pension.

hey I remember 5 1/2" floppys ;)

when I started on computers, you saved the files to audio tape (TRS-80)

the real big floppys were before my time, I think they were 8"?

I remember playing computer programs in my Walkman because I lacked access to Japanese noise records.

lol I can't tell if you are being sarcastic or not, but that is def harsh noise

Absolutely true. And yeah, extremely harsh. Sometimes it would shift very suddenly from stereo to just one speaker and it was like getting punched in the head.

<3

those reviews in like Bananafish used to drive me crazy, ecstatic praise for things that turned out to be acetates in editions of 50

I remember glenn mcdonald's generic Aube review template specified that, back in the furia days.

https://www.furia.com/page.cgi?type=twas&id=twas0097

The trick is this: you can invent a literally unlimited number of fictional Aube albums which you can claim to own and adore, driving the fan you'll never meet insane with envy. For each one, you need only to fill out the following form: "It's called (combine any two whole or partial words having to do with industry or math). It's a limited edition of (pick a number from 500 to 1500), on some label called (pick another word or two involving industry or esoteric superstitions) from (pick any country where public buildings have fluorescent lighting and climate control). Everything on it was made from only the sound of a (pick any object, no matter how innocuous or mute). It's deliriously difficult to listen to, and thus totally cool."
Allow me to demonstrate: "It's called Magnetostriction. It's a limited edition of 777, on some label called God Factory from Holland. Everything on it was made from only the sound of a magnetic resonance spectroscope. It's deliriously difficult to listen to, and thus totally cool." You see? Unless you are able to locate one of the 776 other copies of this disc, you will have no way of knowing whether this album is real or something I invented to amuse myself.

pfft limited to 77 or gtfo ;)

I actually just bought an Aube tape a couple weeks back, one of RRR's "Recycled Music" series where they are dubbed onto cutout bin factory tapes from major labels

#onethread

no overwrought promo copy for this tape, kudos to RRR

Sounds of the Dawn YouTube channel - I maerval at the idea of collecting to many rare cassettes in real form of tape

I saw a teenager buying CDs at B&N yesterday.

I often wonder which of these rare tapes on YouTube are real and which are some retro new recordings.

its a real concern Chris. I wonder if discogs is a source of truth 3098709387