all hail vic

funda-mentality shift

it's inevitable, with time, consumer patterns change.

and you're hearing it from me now, the future is online. ha. old news, you say.

yes and no.

what i'm referring to is the decline of a material consumer impulse in things relating to entertainment.

there will emerge a point, and i don't actually forsee it happening for at least a decade or three, where the desire to actually have a physical representation of a given media will be an impulse of a minority.

what do i mean? i mean that those people, including myself, who have always enjoyed the ostentatious display of entertainment preferences will change their consumption patterns.

it's obvious now and i'm sure i'm not the first person to be of this opinion. iTunes is a HUGE money generator for Apple. it's an indication of the future.

earlier in my life (and by earlier in my life i even mean earlier this year), i was adamant about having the official copy of a cd - i wanted the hard copy because i thought it would look good on a shelf next to my other hundreds of cds. i wanted it because it was not going to fail me. i took good care of it. and i had this image in my mind of eventually being wealthy enough to have a flat or a house with a big library where i could actually line up a cd collection 1000-strong side by side without stacking in any awkward way and show off my collection. but then i reduced my cd collection to binders for ease of transit to college or whatever land, foreign or otherwise, to which i might like to take them. so already my dream of a big library was crumbling.

then there is my dvd collection. a collection which is relegated to collecting dust as i am over here in Prague. a collection that is probably around 500 titles strong and which i refuse to put in the same type of binders as my cds because the binders are known to be more aggressive towards damaging the discs. so they remain in their plastic cases, side by side, on shelves in my home.

i've been anal about organizing and maintaining these two collections too. it's a complicated system, depending on the medium in question, of either genres then artists then albums (cds) or of studios then titles then even production years if necessary (dvds) - an organization system only truly clear in my head. why are the Beatles rock and the Sex Pistols too but not Madonna? well, that's all in my head.

and that is how i've operated for a long time.

but in the past three months, my mind has undergone a fundamental shift in mentality. i no longer need these concrete offerings. i don't need the plastics of cds. for one thing, this will be much kinder to the environment. no longer will i be shedding three layers of plastic into a landfill just for new music.

i started using iTunes and it's a blessing. and it's the most obvious example of the future. look at the enormous burden that my generation is putting on both the music and film industries by illegal file sharing. these people swapping files do not care about the hard copy, they just want the product. most of these people are also around my age or younger. when my generation is "in power" (as in "hits middle age"), cd sales (which are already biting the dust) will be non-existent and dvd sales too.

dvds are archaic already. for one thing, Sony is destined to come out on top for the next generation technology, that of blu-ray dvd. but dvds, by the time blu-ray dvds are available to be marketed, will already be crippled by the availability of downloadable copies. look at what each of the TV stations and film companies are doing now. first ABC starts offering episodes of Lost and Desperate Housewives on iTunes for $1.99 a pop. now NBC and CBS are moving to get their programs online.

they aren't moving to just put current shows online. Warner Bros TV has just announced that it will be offering hundreds of old TV shows online on the website In2TV. these include many shows that are undergoing a stage of renewed interest thanks to high level sales of DVD season-by-season sets.

CBS is about to offer an exclusive, online only scene of CSI: Miami that will initiate a subplot that will be resolved only in the season finale. an extra scene? isn't that the sort of thing we expect from a dvd?

speaking of dvds, i'm still not finished with blu-ray dvds. by the time blu-ray dvd players have saturated the market, the bottom will have fallen out of the official market. fewer people will be buying studio-sanctioned hard copies with nice inserts and nice packaging than will be downloading them online. blu-ray dvds will still be important though because, even though people will be downloading films legally, the storage capacity of their computers will be filled quite quickly unless they can unload these space-eating files. this is where blu-ray dvds will come in - storage. dvds were created to increase storage capacity of disc technology and there they shall remain.

but that's not really why i started this post. this is all technology talk. what is more important, however, is the shift in consumer mentality. and that is the biggest change that will happen. sure, the mediums will change, but the consumer mentality towards music and movies and tv shows will fundamentally change.

there ya go. it's shifting people. my mentality shifted in only the past few weeks. i've downloaded quite a bit off of iTunes and i don't think i'll ever not download an album if it's available. unfortunately, it is still impossible to purchase some artists' music as downloads - one of my favorite groups, Radiohead, a group which i normally associate with being cutting edge still has not released their music for legal download (at least not on iTunes).

regardless, i'm not going to buy another cd if i can help it. for one thing, it helps the environment. for another, cds and dvds are moving to the same space as my hard drive - they're the shelf for the content, not the content itself. so don't be surprised when the ostentatious display of racks of cds and dvds is replaced by ostentatious display of the technology that surrounds these things.

so, having said all of that, anybody want to buy some dvds?

Posted by iain at November 17, 2005 07:54 PM