> I guess buying the vinyl is like buying a shirt or a poster now?
Yeah, in some way that's true. In the house music scene almost every producer also sells vinyls of their best songs, sometimes "collectors editions", and also DJs obviously sometimes pride themselves on only playing vinyl. For the artists I really do enjoy, I tend to buy their songs + with the vinyl, as a way to support them, but I indeed have no way of actually playing them, and haven't had for more than a decade.
So here I sit with 20+ vinyl records, most of them unopened, and no record player. But I don't mind, I just want to give money to the artists that provide me joy.
Are these smaller artists that also have a Patreon?
The first time I moved and had to move and get rid of all my stuff I swore I wouldn’t accumulate it anymore. As much as I like the idea of a vinyl collection I would not want to lug it around during my next move…Stuff is heavy.
I still have my old BluRay collection which I build up from the mid 2000. This already was the replacement of the DVDs I had before. They still sit in the shelve because I don’t know what else to do with the space. Same goes for books etc. I mean I really like the covers etc and the fact one has a physical token. But I simply have too much of it in my house already. And replacing the stuff yet again feels useless. I also like the feeling that if I wanted I could simply let go.
Before someone asks: The unit the BluRays are located is a TV unit. And getting rid of them would mean I have an empty shelve. They also cover the cable / power cord mess behind it a bit. So removing is actually not a solution. I would either need a replacement to put there as a cover or get rid of the TV unit shelve thing :). Typical 1st world problem that is.
About 15 years ago I got rid of almost all of my physical media. I was moving a lot at the time (I've moved 13 times over the last 20 years, several times to different cities) and I had hundreds of CDs, DVDs and books.. It was literally a quarter of my boxes every time I moved..
So I sold and donated all of it, kept what had special value, and re-acquired a lot of it digitally.
I still think I made the right decision, although every now and then I miss something specific and regret it, but I get over it pretty fast.
I also moved many times in the past. Once CD-quality settled, I gifted my vinyls to a thrift store. (The 'art' was immaterial.)
20 years ago, I ripped all of my CDs into 192K MP3s (perfect enough for my ears) using an online metadata service. Getting rid of the 'jewel cases' (and eventually all of their non-CD content) but retaining the CDs (4 Logic cases worth, 3 sq. feet) saved a ton of room.
For backup I archived the thousands of MP3s onto an 80GB Seagate which I organized by genre, then stored in a shoebox. 12 years later I copied the Seagate to two more HDs. It worked fine (but gave-up-the-ghost later that year).
I've relied on those files since. Unlike several dead self-burned CD-Rs, the manu'd CDs (I never use) seem to have remained healthy in the cases at room temp.
I did the same as you about 20 years ago. And about three years ago, I started reinvesting in physical ownership again for my music and movies. For me this started from a desire to reduce my reliance on major tech companies, especially licensed content like media. But since moving in that direction, I've found it very rewarding to curate a collection reflective of my evolving taste, and find I treat my time with a spinning record or blu-ray I had to insert with more focus and attention.
I don't share the anecdote to suggest in any way that you or anyone else would feel the same.
Yeah, I've done this. I've bought records for years but only bought a record player recently. I would want to buy something at the merch table for a small band I like. They don't always have a shirt in my size but they always have records. Oftentimes the records went on loan to friends, which was a nice way of gently spreading my taste.
On the wall above the table with my turntables hang the album covers of some of the albums that were influential in my musical path as a dj. The records are still in their sleeves in a flight case
It's telling that VFX subcontractors are putting out their own BTS content on YouTube now as promotional material, since the primary production companies for shows and films (with a few exceptions) have completely stopped doing this.
I miss director commentary, I loved re-watching movies with that audio track.
Is there just too much content now? Or has streaming become such a "content mill" that the creators aren't inspired enough about their own work to sit down and talk about it after it's complete?
I would guess this is the reason. Before there was unlimited content or ways to entertain yourself on a screen, having additional content on a disc would have been a marketing point to make people feel like they’re getting more for their money.
But now, I doubt even 1 in 1,000 people would respond to that, since there is always something else that can be instantly switched to watching or playing, so why go through the effort?
To be fair, 10 years ago was still a reasonable time to do this (build your own CMS). In the early/mid 2010s the commercial CMS market was dominated by some pretty terrible large enterprise incumbents still stuck in the early 00s.
Would you agree (bias aside, being a CMS provider now) that in 2025 it's probably _less_ advisable to try to build your own bespoke commercial CMS product?
It feels like the CMS market is pretty crowded now, with lots of modern, high-quality open source and commercial products.
> It feels like the CMS market is pretty crowded now, with lots of modern, high-quality open source and commercial products.
I don't know, I feel like it's crowded with options but no options are high-quality and ready to be used commercially. Things like Strapi gets somewhat close, but then fucks up the operational parts by being complex to handle with multiple environments, bad history tracking and much else. So the space of "high quality production-ready open-source CMS" is less crowded than you think, particularly if you aim for a specific niche.
That was one of our early fears. Wanting to continue to remain small, will we be swallowed up by larger competitors, who will devour the entire market? Turns out, it didn't happen. The websites space is really huge, I think there is still an endless number of niches you can attack and optimize for and get a pretty interesting revenue from.
Totally, I think people miss the trees for the forest because VC-fueled startups always have the "all-or-nothing" and "eat the world" attitudes, so people grow up thinking those are the available alternatives. While in reality, getting enough profits to support a team and their "modest" dreams (in comparison) is often more than enough.
I did say both open source and commercial, in the context of "starting a business around a new CMS", so you may be correct about the open source side of the market but that wasn't really what I was asking about.
The commercial/SaaS side specifically is quite crowded now, with lots of good options for businesses of all sizes.
I think perhaps the assumption of the OP (I know mine was in the early days) was that "discovery" on Spotify would involve human tastemakers and some kind of dynamic aggregation of peer tastes that could lead to organic discovery of new music, no matter how niche or obscure.
As opposed to what it has now devolved into: the most basic of similarity matching always showing you the same few hundred songs, combined with increasingly numerous paid placements.
> I remember finding an early EP of an unknown local band on there
So there was a clever trick that smaller artists did on what.cd: put up a really generous upload credit bounty for your own music, in order to sell digital copies.
I knew a few bands in Toronto who did this as a way to make sales.
They'd put up a big bounty right after setting up a webpage offering the album for sale via Paypal, then spend a few days collecting orders (and they would get a lot of them - hundreds sometimes - because What.cd had a lot of users looking for ratio credits) and then eventually email a link to the album after a few days.
No idea what the scale of this trick/scam (call it whatever) was but anecdotally I heard about it enough.
The bit in the blog post about the amount of music uploaded yearly to Spotify was shocking.
I'm sure there's lots of unsigned self-published artists uploading their music in there, but so much of that has to be auto-generated and AI-generated slop.
> but so much of that has to be auto-generated and AI-generated slop.
There is. And most people would not even recognize a lot of AI music without multiple listens and digging through things like "is there any online presence (which can also be easily spoofed)".
I've fallen into the trap myself with some (pretty generic) blues music
To be fair, the whole job market has changed. Layoffs and the death of "a job for life" is not unique to IBM.
I think the pace of progress and innovation has, for better or worse, meant that companies can no longer count on successfully evolving only from the inside through re-training and promotions over the average employee's entire career arc (let's say 30 years).
The reality is that too many people who seek out jobs in huge companies like IBM are not looking to constantly re-invent themselves and learn new things and keep pushing themselves into new areas every 5-10 years (or less), which is table stakes now for tech companies that want to stay relevant.
Honestly, I think that's people reacting to the market more than it's the market reacting to people.
If your average zoomer had the ability to get a job for life that paid comparably well by a company that would look after them, I don't think loyalty would be an issue.
The problem is today, sticking with a company typically means below market reward, which is particularly acute given the ongoing cost of living crises affecting the west.
Well, if you're unable to read, you're not going to figure out what the buttons do by reading the textual labels :p
Further, if you have difficulty reading, it's easier to parse the meaning of an abstract symbol, so you'd use that instead of a textual label when available. (I say this as someone who is a really slow reader. I use icons when I can)
reply