With Sony potentially exiting the 4K market, everyone is disappointed with physical media. Again.
But should they be?
Of course, Sony is a big brand and the impression that they seem to be giving up on their hardware ambitions is disappointing. However, this is the same company that will release not one, but two turntables in 2026 for the first time in eight years. That doesn’t suggest a company has completely given up on the idea of people enjoying physical media.
I’ve talked about the resurgence of vinyl, cassette players and CDs; And although each of them faces problems, the future may not be as bleak as is claimed. Maybe the future is actually yesterday.
Millennials are turning back to the millennium
Things have changed. The 2000s were all about downloading music, whether it was Napster or Limewire. People figured out they could get music for free, and the music industry took too long to remedy the situation.
It’s a problem they’ve probably never been able to fix. It changed both music consumption and the value of music, and even today, more than 25 years later, musicians are still struggling with a lack of royalties and payouts from music streaming services.
But there is a new generation that is slowly rediscovering physical media and the way to enjoy it. There’s been a lot of talk about how millennials buy records – yes, maybe they don’t listen to them and just hang records on the wall because a) they like the look of record sleeves and b) they want to support the artists they like; But this is an entry into the world of vinyl and we shouldn’t discount it in the age of streaming algorithms that don’t really do what they’re supposed to do.
CDs are experiencing a resurgence with a flood of new players coming onto the market, whether they are fixed, dedicated or portable players; Again, we cannot ignore that there is interest in an area of the market that most people thought no longer existed.
That doesn’t mean this resurgence can continue on its own. When I visited Naim’s headquarters in Salisbury, I learned that Naim is not in the market for producing new CD transports as there are relatively few (or no) companies left making these transports. But that might be a short-sighted decision in the long run: If demand for CDs continues to rise, the supply has to come from somewhere.
And then there are people who find cassette tapes (even VHS) and go back to wired audio. I’ve seen a lot of people younger than me wearing wired headphones, and while I see the movement as something of a fad (there’s a reason we moved away from wired headphones in the first place), you can’t ignore the fact that people are finding reasons to buy wired headphones again; be it a fashion look, a performance look or a slightly questionable (at least for me) health and safety look.
If it was just vinyl, people might ignore this physical media comeback. But it’s Blu-ray/DVD/4K Blu-ray, it’s old media, it’s CDs and it’s wired headphones. All we need is for newspapers and magazines to come back, and then you can’t call it a comeback because none of it ever really went away.
Sometimes you have to work for it.
One reason for the return of physical media may be the notion that streaming and digital media haven’t made things simpler, easier, or more convenient. Having everything under control has made things more difficult and slower in some ways.
I had a conversation in which I mentioned that I had been sitting in front of the TV for quite a while and didn’t know what to watch (or where to go to start watching TV). There’s so much choice, but not much of it is compelling enough to make you feel like you have to watch it.
Every now and then there’s a series of “Traitors” that you have to not only watch, but follow as they unfold – but that experience feels like it’s rare in an age of catch-up, on-demand, and “discovery.”
But when there were four (or five) channels, you knew what to watch because the choice was limited. Having devices that can do everything is wonderful in some ways, but it can also lead to fatigue and indecision.
From a video streaming perspective, it feels like you have to catch up to be able to join the conversation. When it comes to music streaming, the conversation can be over before you even realize it’s started. Who’s still talking about Phoebe Bridgers’ Lost Weekend a few months after its release? It probably won’t come back into conversation until the year-end discussions about the best music albums.
The return to old habits is not “retro”, but rather a recovery of the experience around listening to music and watching films and television. There are more turntable launches than I can remember. Bose has sold out of its wired headphones; that’s how great the demand for them is.
Long live physical media and old-school devices, not because they are better than digital media, but because they bring a different perspective to the table. And in this day and age, when there is so much crap, what was old has become new again.
