The Death of Physical Media
No, information does not want to be free.
The WWE, the world’s largest wrestling company (that will tell you every chance it gets that it is a diversified media and technology company, not some combat-focused touring carnival) has announced that it will no longer produce and sell DVDs and Blu Rays of its shows in the United States. Fans who want to watch the WWE’s vast archive of wrestling can find some footage online and most by subscribing to Peacock, NBC Universal’s streaming service and a WWE business partner.
As Gen-Xers, the Scholar Wife and The Middlebrow still own piles of CDs and DVDs, though not even our computers have drives for them anymore. These artifacts sit, unused, in our basement storage room or tucked away in cabinets. When we move, these items move with us, for no purpose other than sentimentality. A few weeks ago, the Scholar Wife and the Middlebrow unearthed her collection of LPs from her childhood home. The collection was durably manufactured, and all seems ready to play. Though there’ little reason to risk scratching anything since it’s all been digitally remastered for streaming. This physical media does not, so far as we can tell, contain anything we can’t find online someplace. We could give up our CDs and DVDs and not lose access to information. It would not change our lives at all.
Until it does. As the online world develops, owners of movies, music, sports footage, and art are getting better at controlling who can see their properties, where, when and for how much. The Internet could be a repository for every film ever made, anywhere in the world, available any time, but it is not. Instead, it’s a mishmash of owners and scofflaws, in constant tension. The Middlebrow once Tweeted footage he took of a Duran Duran concert, only to have the Tweet taken down years later when the record label complained that its music had been misappropriated.
In the digital world, we own nothing, not even our memories of concerts we paid to see. For a small monthly fee, Spotify will let you hear almost any song you want at any time, without commercials, and they’ll throw in a Hulu subscription so you can access television programming. But you own nothing but the right to use their service. Previously, The Middlebrow would buy physical albums, DVDs, and VHS tapes, used whenever possible. While this transaction did not transfer ownership of the artwork it did transfer physical ownership of the object.
If Spotify and your favorite artists have a spat and they get kicked off the streaming services, which just happened to hundreds of stand-up comedians because of a royalties dispute, then you have to find their work elsewhere, even if their comedy albums were on your favorites list. This could never happen with a CD. When Warner Brothers and Prince went to war in the 1990s, Warner was not able to come take people’s albums away from them.
We’ve given up ownership for permissions. For example: The Middlebrow bought Blake Bailey’s biography of Philip Roth before the scandal that caused the publishing house Viking to cut ties with the author. Whatever happened to the Viking print run of the book (I hear it was pulped), the publisher can’t reclaim Middlebrow’s copy. Had the Middlebrow bought a Kindle edition, the license agreement would have allowed Viking to remove any downloaded ebooks. This also happens with Apps purchased from Apple and Google – if those tech companies decide they no longer want to sell or support an app, it can disappear from your phone the next time it’s updated.
Publishers, movie, music, and game producers have many reasons to want to alter items in their catalogues. They might hold certain titles back, to create scarcity, they might want to alter or delete content to fit with changing societal norms or they might just want to use new technology to change the look of a scene, as George Lucas did repeatedly with the original Star Wars trilogy. Ownership of physical media allows the consumer some power here – on Middlebrow’s DVD of Star Wars, Han always shoots first. The owner of a DVD collection of Seinfeld will get every episode. Somebody watching every episode on Netflix will miss a few that have aged badly and been pulled from circulation.
The elimination of physical media for wrestling is particularly significant because so much of its fandom grew out of a culture of tape trading during the pre-streaming era. Wrestling fans swapped VHS recording of hyper-local shows around the U.S., that would never be seen on national or cable television, and they also traded for shows from Japan, Mexico, and Europe. While online footage is easier and cheaper to share, the WWE owns a vast library covering the dramatic sport’s history and is now the main gatekeeper controlling what fans can see, where and when they can see it and how they can share it. Up until this year, WWE maintained its own streaming network which had uploaded many obscure matches from bygone eras, all searchable to the exact match on a given show. WWE closed its network when it partnered with Peacock, the streaming service operated by NBC. The search function is no longer to-the-match precise, and the older archive is diminished. In a streaming world, what audiences can access can change quickly, depending on the business aims of the host platform.
Another thing lost to streaming is the right to resell your property. Selling used books, movies and music was rarely a windfall event, but it could motivate decluttering and subsidize future purchases. At least the movies I bought at retailers like Hastings and Blockbuster are in The Middlebrow’s basement years later. What happens to a movie purchased digitally from Apple or Amazon? Will the seller make sure I still have access to the media in 2042, given all that will change technologically and for their businesses between now and then?
Nothing is ever forever. Particularly not if it’s all online.