Welcome back my friends, to the flamboyance that never ends, as Fabulously Flamboyant Friday proudly delivers another groin-polished googly from the gasworks-end of contemporary culture. Tonight, dear reader, as we respectfully mark both International Drop A Rock Day and National Rat Catcher’s Day, we shall go back (dad, dad, daddy-o) to the future! – Not Arf! I mean, um… Great Scott!
Tonight’s missive was inspired by a recent visit to one of HMV’s capacious high street emporia. One of our grandsprogs was desirous of a new console game for his birthday and ‘er indoors despatched me to obtain an item of suitable utility. On entry, I was genuinely surprised to note how busy the HMV store was. It was positively heaving! I later discovered there had been some sort of in-store appearance by a chap who, clearly, was not just an popular beat combo, but thoroughly dahn wid da kidz as well.
Nevertheless, given the music industry’s prolonged and substantial move from physical media to online streaming and download distribution, the Saturday morning throng I beheld came as something of a surprise. I suppose I had mentally labelled HMV for a fast-approaching transfer to the file that already contains the likes of Woolworth, Wilco and WH Smith – i.e. an organisation with very little, if any, in the way of a bricks and mortar, high street future.
Well, clearly I was wrong: the store was packed to the gunwales with screechy bright young things and was evidently doing a roaring trade. Worse, at least from my point-of-view, the acres of stacked and racked items that lay before me – along with the depressingly long queue for the tills – seemed to indicate my hopes of a quick and easy purchase, to be followed by a swift trip to a conveniently adjacent ‘Spoons, were fading faster than a politician’s post-election popularity.
Nevertheless, feeling a little like Father Ted in the lingerie department, I embraced my density, girded my loins and sallied forth into the heaving maelstrom. Later, as I stood, exhausted, in the sluggishly serpentine queue for the depressingly distant tills, a couple of recent news reports began to coalesce in what little remains of my addled brain, and this motley missive was born.
The first of these news items was the recent announcement from Sony that no new PlayStation games will be released on physical media from the end of next year. Sony have described this as a natural adaption to consumer trends and point to the general preference for online digital streaming
Apparently, the streaming of games significantly outpaces the falling demand for old-school physical discs, so fair nuff, I s’pose. However, as this announcement arrived around the same time as a story that seemed to suggest some users had allegedly lost access to a selection of on-line movies for which they had purchased digital access rights, it is perhaps unsurprising that gamers began to sit up and pay attention.
The UK’s trade organization for this sort of thing (the Entertainment Retailers Association – aka the ERA) was unsurprisingly quick to criticize Sony’s decision; and HMV, along with many other retailers, again, unsurprisingly, also condemned the plan, describing it as a triumph of corporate convenience over consumer choice. But there has also been a significant backlash from users, with the level of pushback surprising many. The Sony decision was announced in an official blog post that quickly received thousands of negative responses from customers, with many pointing out that buyers will not technically own any digital game they purchase in future. Hmm.. How does that saying go? You will own nothing and you will be happy…
Anyway, it’s not just PlayStation discs that punters are suddenly keen on retaining. After years of steady decline, sales of Blu-ray discs are once again on the up, with many citing their frustration with streaming services as the main reason. Streaming service customers, it turns out, are not overly keen on a film or TV show suddenly leaving a streaming service, only to pop up on a rival service or indeed disappear altogether. The realisation of just how tentative the digital ‘ownership’ of media on streaming platforms can be, would seem to be dawning on punters, which in turn seems to be driving the rise in sales of physical media such as Blu-ray discs. If you can hold it in your sticky paws and play it on a non-networked device, it’s yours to keep and no subscription service can switch it off on a whim.
Which brings us neatly on to audio CDs. The substantial and ongoing resurgence in the sales of vinyl records has been well documented over recent years and the format (my personal favourite) continues to sell well. However, this welcome resurgence in the popularity of physical media has apparently now extended to that ’80s poptastic favourite, the humble CD.
CDs were a hugely successful technological child of the 1980s, but so too was their nemesis: the dreaded mp3. Back in the late ’80s, a team of nerds and smartarses at the Fraunhofer Institute of Very Difficult Things were scratching their heads over the problem of compressing audio without significantly compromising quality over digital phone lines. They eventually came up with the now infamous mp3 (launched in 1995) which quickly became a much favoured method of storing and sharing music via computer.
Unfortunately for the music industry, a chap called Shawn Fanning thought mp3s were a spiffing wheeze and invented Napster, a peer-to-peer file-sharing application (released in 1999) that allowed Joe Public to share mp3s with ease. Napster, quite frankly, revolutionized music distribution and shook the established music industry to its very core. The rise of Fanning’s software was explosive. It spread virally on college campuses, and by the early noughties well over 20 million users were registered on his system. Suddenly, the discovery and sharing of music was pretty much instantaneous – and above all, free. At it’s peak, an estimated 80 million songs a day were being shared using Fanning’s Napster software. Napster was soon followed by much faster, slicker, Bit Torrent technology, and before you could say “your turn in the barrel, son”, there were more pirates online than there ever were on the Spanish Main.
Despite fire-hosing lawsuits in all directions, the big record companies knew the game was up and realised they would have to evolve, embrace the brave new world of streaming or face utter financial ruin. Before long, official streaming services were up and running, punters began dumping their CDs in charity shops and the long slow decline of the CD began.
However, the latest figures from the US suggest that sales of LPs, CDs and even cassette tapes (truly the ginger stepchild of hardware formats… or would that perhaps be the 8-track cartridge..?) increased by a very healthy 7.8% in the first half of this year. But what’s intriguing about that figure is that the majority of that rather healthy growth in sales seems to have been driven by purchases of compact disks – a format the music industry believed, as recently as 18 months ago, to be fast fading to the kind of popularity levels currently enjoyed by the aforementioned 8-track cartridge.
I have to admit, I’m really quite pleased by this. CDs are capable of reasonably high-quality audio, it’s a relatively convenient format, and you can easily burn copies and backup files onto your computer or digital audio player (I use and old Brennan player which currently has copies of well over a thousand CD albums stored on it).
So who’s buying all this physical media? Well, research suggests the recent increase in popularity is largely being driven by two cohorts: Gen Z and Millennials. However, the reasons behind this change in behaviour are not entirely straightforward.
Millennials and Gen Z do not seem to be buying CDs to rebel against streaming. On the contrary, they seem rather keen on streaming and cheerfully embrace the technology. They’re the most enthusiastic customers of streaming services and are currently driving the success of that particular industry. However, perhaps surprisingly, this is the same cohort who seem to be buying physical CD copies of the very same albums they play via their streaming services.
When asked why, the driving force behind this behaviour, once again, seems to be the security of owning a physical copy that cannot disappear when a licensing deal changes or a subscription service ends. Additionally, there seems to be an additional motive at play here – the desire to support artists they admire and enjoy. Both Millennials and Gen Z are well aware that streaming produces very little financial return for an artist, whereas the purchase of a physical copy of an album on vinyl or CD, particularly if it’s directly from an artist’s website, can generate far more financial reward for the artist in question.
And the figures here are quite stark: For independent artists, a CD might typically cost a couple of quid to manufacture, but of course might sell for anywhere between £10 or £15 a pop. In contrast, a single play on one of the major streaming services might generate as little as $0.003 for the artist or copyright owner.
But it’s not just smaller independent artists who are keen to exploit this recent resurgence in the popularity of physical media. Life Of A Showgirl, the latest and greatest hot platter from the much-loved musical genius known to we unworthy mortals as The Blessed Tay Tay (GP’s resident Friday night pop Goddess and all-round Puffin favourite) was released in no less than 18 CD variants, each with different artwork. I suspect more than a few parents will have wept for their wallets when that particular marketing move was announced.
And that’s not the only wallet-bashing physical release around at the moment – the market is currently awash with bumper goodies! If 18 versions of Tay Tay’s latest album isn’t enough joy for Puffins of sound musical sense, Phil Collins – the legendary tub-thumper, throat-warbler, thespian, diamond geezer and all-round good egg – has thrilled his many fans with the news that Face Value, his 1981 debut meisterwerk, is to be expanded and re-released on vinyl as a quadruple album, no less.
Queen’s response to this shameless and wanton profligacy seems to be “hold my beer”, as they’ve just re-released their 1974 sophomore album, Queen II, (by far their most adventurous and satisfying outing, IMHO) as a whopping 7-disc album. Not to be outdone, legendary ’70s progmeisters, Yes, (no doubt saying “hold my tofu”) have released a truly whopping, if slightly ludicrous (but I still went out and bought it…), 15-disc version of their somewhat dodgy 1973 album, Tales From Topographic Oceans. 15 discs! Afford it? I could barely lift it! And I’m sure Phil The Ex-Test Manager is, as we speak, lobbying hard for a 25-disc version of Morrissey’s Greatest Hits.
However, there is a fly in the ointment. Somewhat unfortunately – and in an unexpected echo of the resurgence of vinyl – meeting the rising demand for CDs could very soon become something of a challenge. When the current vinyl resurgence initially took off, record labels soon discovered there were simply not enough record pressing plants still in use to keep up with the continual surge in demand. And if CD sales continue on their current upward trajectory, the record industry might soon find itself with a very similar supply-side bottleneck. In the US, for example, there are just three fully operational mass CD replication facilities – a fraction of the number that were up and running just a few years ago. The good news is that it’s much easier to set up CD production facilities than it is to set up a record pressing plant, so I fully expect this problem to go away if the current surge in demand persists.
However, for now at least, CD supplies are meeting demand, record labels are utterly delighted to have two ancient, viable and highly profitable physical formats to flog, and vinyl – for the time being at least – remains the dominant darling of the music marketplace for physical media sales. Nevertheless, CDs, that dated data disc of the ’80s and near-nemesis of 1940s LP technology, currently seems to be catching up fast and might soon be going toe-to-toe, once more, with its old 12″ adversary. Streaming? Where we’re going, we don’t need streaming…
Anyway, that’s probably quite enough of my digital dribbling for one evening, so I shall say TTFN to one and all. May all your passages be salubrious, your gardens inclined and your puddles well jumped.
Goodnight and may your Frog go with you – Not Arf!
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