Why is Physical Media Back?

I thought we were done with physical media. Like a hermit crab trading in its plastic shell, we all collectively shed physical collections, replacing them with streaming libraries or very fast digital piracy. But now, new CD and cassette players are hitting the market for the first time in years, vinyl is not just for hipsters anymore, and teenagers who never rented a VHS tape in their life are thrifting copies of The Matrix on DVD and calling it “vintage” – so what on Earth is going on?

Well, the physical media movement has been going strong for years and I’ve always approved of it in theory, but in practice I’ve been pretty happy in my digital life. However, after modding my iPod and digging up my old CDs I’ve been feeling a certain itch and, finally, I’ve decided to take the plunge. Today I’m revisiting four physical media formats, because I want to figure out what this resurgence really means.

CD – The Thrill of the Hunt

I love charity shops and usually I’d head straight for the books, but lately I’ve been starting in a different section.

Now is a good time to get back into CDs, mostly because of the price. You might not be able to thrift everything but even actual record stores will sell CDs at a steal. The Arctic Monkeys’ debut album was important to me growing up – I think my band covered every single song – but back then I probably only heard it as a playlist of low-quality mp3s. Now I have it in lossless audio quality for 3 pound.

A lot of people on my last video asked why I didn’t just pirate everything. First of all, I do want CD-level quality which isn’t always available online (unless you’re in very niche communities that I’m not part of) but, regardless, where’s the joy in entering a name into a search bar? That doesn’t feel like real collecting.

I’ve been enjoying rooting around for old favourites: There’s a high when you come across something you’ve been hoping for, or maybe something you’ve forgotten about – like the Scrubs season 1 soundtrack! I know Zach Braff memed his own music taste to death in Garden State, but him bringing weird CDs onto the set of Scrubs turned the show into a compilation of non-stop early 2000s indie bangers. That soundtrack isn’t something you’d stumble across on a streaming service – in fact, I looked it up on Apple Music and most of the songs couldn’t even be played. Stumbling across the Scrubs soundtrack gave me an intense dopamine hit – it felt like I’d won the jackpot on a slotmachine and, in terms of brain chemistry, that’s exactly what happened.

Let me explain thorugh the lens of dog training. You’d think the best way to reinforce a dog’s behaviour would be to reward it every time – that’s how Pavlov got his dogs to drool, after all – and it is usually considered the best way to initiate a behaviour, but once a habit is learned, the best way to maintain it is with a variable ratio of reinforcement, where the reward for you action only comes sometimes.

This is equally true for dogs and humans. If you always get rewarded for a certain behaviour, you might get tired of the reward, but if you only get rewarded sometimes then the behaviour itself becomes addictive. That’s why it’s so hard to put down TikTok, not because every single video is fantastic, but because the next video might be fantastic –and you’ll only know if you keep swiping! All major social media platforms use the same behavioural science to keep users addicted, and it’s no coincidence that swiping a screen to refresh is similar to pulling the arm of a slot machine, because this is the same behavioural science that keeps people addicted to gambling.

Like many people, I’m trying to spend less time on my smartphone, less time swiping, and it turns out that my charity shop visits have offered an alternative. In my search for CDs, I have inadvertently created a gambling-like scenario that allows me to get that dopamine hit without damaging my mental health or (with the price of CDs these days) my bank account. I think this is the first big appeal of “physical media” – you get to indulge in the act of collecting, that addictive hunt for albums and artists.

However, I have to admit that CDs aren’t the first physical media format I’ve gotten back into.

Vinyl - The Medium is the Message

For years, me and my partner joked that we’re the kind of douche bags for whom a record player would eventually appear in our home (whether we wanted it or not) so we may as well stop fighting it. Vinyl, however, has a distinct disadvantage against CDs in that they’re not dirt cheap – usually. That’s why most of my vinyl records are from one spot – Bragehall second hand in Leksand. If you’re digging for vinyl in Sweden you’ll mostly find old “dansband” records (a genre of country pop designed to make you want to rip your ears off) but Bragehall actually have the good stuff, and a lot of it ranges from 60–100 crowns (about 4–10 euro), so except for some purchases directly from artists, this is where my small record collection is from.

You can’t talk about the physical media resurgence without talking about vinyl. While CD sales might have grown modestly in 2023, vinyl sales have grown consistenly for 17 years. After giving way to cassettes in the 1980s, vinyl sales disappeared almost entirely for two decades before, in 2008, suddenly starting to grow, a fact often accredited to the rise of the “hipster”. Vinyl now makes up 8% of music revenue; more than any other physical music format and its highest revenue share since 1988.

I find the timing here very interesting – mp3 players and smartphones were decimating CD sales and yet somehow vinyl came back? It suddenly thrived while other physical media formats evaporated, so we have to assume that vinyl records were able to provide something that digital downloads and music streaming could not.

You’ve probably heard the term “the medium is the message”. It’s the first chapter in Marshall McLuhan’s 1964 hit book “Understanding Media”, which he followed up with the confusingly titled “The Medium is the Massage” a few years later. McLuhan posits that “Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication.” He describes the ‘content’ as a distraction, and says that the true “‘message’ of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.”

For example, the introduction of the railway created completely new cities, and new ways of life, and it did so regardless of what specific freight any particular train might be carrying. Similarly, if you lose your factory job due to increased automation, it doesn’t really matter if the factory is churning out cornflakes or Cadillacs – you’re still out of a job. To McLuhan, any technology has inherent effects based on its design and the same expensive champagne will taste quite different depending on if you’re drinking it out of a fancy glass or a dirty shoe.

And what is vinyl, if not a fancy glass?

Vinyl is big and concrete and I think that’s why it took off around the same time as the abstract format that is music streaming. For decades, music formats got smaller and smaller in the name of convenience, until finally they disappeared, replaced by mp3-players and then smartphones – but when we started being able to listen to any song in the world at will, eventually people found that there was something missing. Because if the medium is the message then music streaming has its own message, and it is this:

Music is not important.

Streaming giants emphasize lean-back listening, they shuffle real artists out in favour of stock music, and they swindle musicians out of royalties whenever they can, all while tracking your every move and boasting to advertisers about how they can manipulate you.

Vinyl records don’t do any of that shit! It’s not even easy to skip tracks; it’s an inconvenient format, and that is the point. I started my humble collection after visiting some friends, chatting all night and taking turns picking records to play from their collection. I enjoyed flipping through their LPs, seeing where our tastes overlapped, and finding interesting surprises – I saw albums I’d forgotten, now writ large and made important. It was a completely different experience from adding songs to a Spotify queue or even passing around an Aux cable (which was the “Spotify” of my younger days). That night I don’t think I looked at my phone once – unless it was to research how much a record player cost.

McLuhan would say that the sound cannot be separated from the method, and the physical experience of interacting with the object is part of the album. This is the second reason that physical media is in resurgence – it’s bringing back the importance of the object itself, something that modern technology has replaced with a convenience, yes, but also an undercurrent of unease.

Cassette Tapes - Democratising Media

Cassettes are a format I thought I’d left far behind. I grew up surrounded by them, literally, because my dad recorded audiobooks, and while cassettes were no longer a new technology when I was growing up, they were still everywhere – and dirt cheap, like CDs are now – so it was a technology I used a lot, recording “radio shows” with my friends around age 10, and later, as a teenager, recording our punk rock band. This, more than any, is a format where I remember the imperfections; the hassle of carrying dozens of cassettes just to listen to one audiobook; the fact that you could often faintly hear the other side of the tape. I did try buying some new cassettes for this video but it didn’t make me feel much. No, my best cassette-related memories are the ones where I’m making things.

And making things was – and is – the magic of cassettes.

It’s hard to grasp how revolutionary the cassette tape was; as Canadian scholar Paul Théberge wrote in 2001:

There are whole sub-cultures and music genres that wouldn’t exist without the humble cassette. and everyday users could suddenly record their own records, or the radio, or just copy tapes and share them. The mixtape became a cultural phenemenon and it’s no wonder, because it was an entirely new way of interacting creatively with music that you love.

As you might expect, this democratising power freaked out record industry middlemen and in the early ‘80s the “British Phonographic Industry” launched a propaganda campaign with the slogan “Home Taping Is Killing Music”. They added the line “and it’s illegal” which was largely wishful thinking, and you might recognise the logo from the many times it’s been parodied and referenced over the years. Some governments kowtowed to the record industry and imposed levies on the sale of blank cassettes and recorders, but the tide of culture could not be stemmed. As the Dead Kennedys wrote on one of their cassettes: ”Home taping is killing record industry profits! We left this side blank so you can help.”

Outside the wealthy global north, cassettes became even more important because pressing vinyl required up-front investments and specialised labour but as Roger Wallis and Krister Malm wrote in “ Big Sounds from Small Peoples” in 1984: “The most isolated village can get its first cassette recorder before it has running water or mains electricity.” Of course, cassettes were used to spread “western” music but they also revitalised local music traditions, like in Sri Lanca, where intellectuals argued about whether the radio should play more traditional drumming or North Indian art music – all while the public bought cassettes of “Balia” music, a “lower” form of folk culture that you wouldn’t hear on the radio, at least not back then – it has long since entered Sri Lancan mainstream culture, and I think the cassette definitely helped.

Cassettes aren’t the only format to embody these creative and democratising powers, but they were the first – for decades they gave people the power to capture and interact with media, whether that’s my mother making a mixtape off the radio in the 80s, my brother playing commodore 64 games in the 90s, or me in the year 2000 recording the entirety of “Muppet Treasure Island”. This is the third reason that physical media is coming back: it allows you to use your taste and creativity to build a collection, and if you do it right, it’s your life on a shelf.

DVD - Escaping Liquid Modernity

I wasn’t going to get back into DVDs.

I mean, they’re not even in HD resolution, and the standard has long sincemoved to 4K so why would I bother?

Then I saw a Hornblower boxset in a charity shop.

This 1998 adaptation of C. S. Forester’s Hornblower series follows the adventures of a British Royal Navy officer during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Horatio is very much an Imperial Wonder Boy and the whole production has a tinge of propaganda to it but by jove is it entertaining! And while it is available on youtube, I now own the highest quality version of this show that exists, even though, it’s “just a DVD.” Resolution isn’t everything when it comes to quality; equally important is the amount of data contained in each second of footage. video streamers and digital pirates alike are incentiviced to compress video files so that they transfer smoothly, but each standard DVD contains over 4 GB of data, so while the resolution might be lower, there’s more information per pixel.

There’s an more important reason to pick up DVDs, especially of TV shows from the 90s and early 2000s, because these were generally produced in a 4:3 aspect ratio to match the shape of TVs at the time. Nowadays media rights holders will often crop these shows to match the widescreen format of today’s TVs, and those are usually the only versions you can find on streaming platforms – this absolutely infuriates me and it should infuriate you. There are, of course, egregious examples of jokes and important information being cropped out but, besides that, what you choose to put in the frame is always important. How you balance and compose your shot, these are key parts of the artistic expression of the visual medium – and messing with that is the same ripping random pages out of a book!

DVDs cannot be changed after the fact. They are solid; which is increasingly rare now that we’ve entered a time of great uncertainty, characterised by fleeting experiences and relationships. At least that’s how Zygmunt Bauman describes our present era, which he calls “Liquid Modernity”. According to Bauman, this great uncertainty is the result of 20th century elites untying the economy from any political or ethical entanglements, and letting market logic dominate not just the economy, but culture and morality and identity as well. While this economic order isn’t open to other options, our everyday lives are paralyzed by choice. We’re trapped in a game of musical chairs, changing our jobs, locations, partners – all without the promise of ever achieving fulfilment. Older generations often cannot fathom why young people don’t just stay in the same business for their entire career, or just save up and buy a house like they did back in the day. They fail to grasp that by allowing the “economy” (in other words, the ultra rich) to reign supreme, ordinary people are made disposable.

Bauman writes that solid social structures have melted placing the “burden of pattern-weaving and the responsibility for failure […] on the individual’s shoulders”. If we get sick, it’s because we weren’t following a good enough health regime, if we stay unemployed it’s because we didn’t try hard enough or we’re simply lazy. Everywhere we are encouraged to find biographical solutions to systemic problems as if we can actually fix environmental damage by putting plastic in the green bin.

As Bauman puts it: “There is a nasty fly of impotence in the tasty ointment of freedom.”

Bauman made this analysis in the early 2000s and, arguably, things have only gotten worse. Work has been shattered into “gig work”, which famously promises employees freedom, while trapping them in deals that only get worse and worse over time – and, of course, films, music and TV have all become “content” that we rent from corporate overlords who have the freedom to alter or remove any of that culture as they see fit.

DVDs are the antidote to that, both in terms of their physical permanence and their bonus features, which were a huge part of their appeal. The immediacy of digital living has turned all entertainment into an endless stream of disposable stimuli. Media can still get popular, but make no mistake: We are a hoard of locusts, quickly moving from one property to the next, and we’ll only think about Tiger King or whatever for as long as it takes to strip every morsel of flesh off Joe Exotic’s bones.

But DVDs can give works of art the weight and context that they deserve, and they provide autonomy over media, free from licensing, deletions, or algorithmic interference. And that is my fourth and final reason that physical media is coming back.

There’s just one problem with DVDs: How do I stop buying them?

HOARDING

Hoarding and physical media can go hand in hand, except that unlike everything else we’ve discussed, hoarding is bad both for you, and bad for the media. Hoarding is accumulation to stave off anxiety – and when you see value in everything, it means you don’t actually value anything. At the same time, I get it – when I see 5 DVDs for 1 EUR I want to buy all the DVDs…

So how can we balance this?

Before Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi coined the term “flow” he co-authored “The Meaning of Things”, a study on how we relate to objects in our home. The book is from 1981 but it feels strangely resonant today, especially the parts that talk about attention. Whether you want to reach for a cup of coffee, or write a novel, you can only achieve your goals by directing your attention, so how we choose to direct our attention defines who we are.

“When someone invests psychic energy in an object […] that object becomes “charged with the energy of the agent. […] this lost energy can turn into a gain if as a result of the investment the agent achieves a goal he or she has set for his or herself.”

I think “attention economy” is too generous a term to describe the reality we find ourselves in. It’s a system that thrives on distraction, addiction and compulsion, all factors that disable our ability to construct our own identities. As they put in “The Meaning of Things”:

In other words, surround yourself with objects that give you purpose and direction, but make sure you’re deliberate with your curation and attention, otherwise you’ll end up surrounded by CDs you never listen to.

Conclusion

We’ve talked about CD, vinyl, cassettes and DVD, and the reasons each have returned but, really, the four reasons I’ve outlined apply across all, and across many other archaic formats that people are picking back up again. (Shout outs to all the minidisc heads out there!) Each of these formats will have afficionados that swear by them, and who might rightly point out that I’m not doing everything to get the perfect sound. I’ve only dipped my toe into each of these ponds, to understand their current-day appeal first hand, and the main thing this experiment has brought to light is what they all have in common:

There’s always a friction to using these older physical media formats. This stands in opposition to streaming services that provide such a smooth experience that you don’t even need to choose what to play – but streaming services also flatten us into nothing but consumers, something we recognise as inherently wrong, because we know that there are real people out there; human beings who decided to spend their limited time on Earth making you laugh, or dance, or think. And they put in so much attention on the creation side – the least they deserve is a fraction of that effort on our end.

Ritual is the word that comes to mind. Whether it’s a dusty cassette or a scratched CD, the effort you put into playing a physical media format imbues that media with importance and meaning. Streaming is surface level interaction because it’s designed by dorks and suits who don’t think culture is important, but it is! It deserves pomp and circumstance: The telling a story, the singing a song, these are some of the deepest and oldest ways for humans to connect.

We’ve only been able to capture sound and video for a century and a half. We’re figuring out how these recordings fit into our lives. But if there’s one thing that the return of physical media shows, it is this: Some things are worth holding onto, even if it takes some effort.

Jakob Burrows

August 2025