HOLLYWOOD—It is a harsh reality, but streaming is the future. As much as I love it, I absolutely hate it at the same time. Why? Reliability. The internet is not great all the time and you have situations where it doesn’t work, or it stops working and it creates an unspeakable frustration. CDs have dissipated from retail stores I want to say almost five plus years ago, they seem ancient, but there are people who still own CDs and they have a lot of them.
CDs aren’t even made anymore, if they are tell me a place where you can purchase them. I have a big theory on why they’ve gone extinct. The quality of music just sucks. I mean in the 70s, 80s, 90s, even early 00s, you had albums you could play from start to finish, but once iTunes and all those music outlets starting to come to fruition things changed. Musicians weren’t focused on making quality albums, they wanted to craft hits. Sorry, I’m not spending $15 to $20 on a CD that has only one or two good songs, when you go back to the 80s and you have something like “Thriller” that doesn’t have a single dud on the entire album!
You do have vinyl records that have made a massive comeback and they still appear in stores at some retailers, but you have to have a record player to enjoy and a cost of $40 to $50 for a vinyl album is too much for me. I’m not spending that I’m just not.
It is not just music that is disappearing from the stores, movies are as well, yes you could purchase DVDs, Blu-Rays and 4K digital discs to enjoy at home and on your on entertainment system. Well, those days are fleeting. Best Buy earlier this year stopped selling them completing. At first they weren’t in stores, and now its wiped off their website.
You cannot purchase them at the retailer anymore. Target USED to sell them in stores, but in the past month or so, guess what, they have vanished. They replaced them with books. Who the hell is still reading books! It baffled me beyond being baffled, you still have books in stores, but DVDs, and Blu-Rays no more.
Forget it, it is so bad that now you go to Target’s website to purchase and the price is just ridiculous this is the problem when a market is cornered or businesses that used to sell certain products stop doing it or go out of business. It leaves the consumer stuck and without a place to fulfill those needs. I think Walmart might be the only place where I can actually go into a store and purchase movies now, and even that I’m uncertain about.
Sorry, I know what many of you are thinking, go to Amazon. No, it isn’t going happen. I don’t like the notion of ordering everything online and having to wait for something to be delivered to my home. I’m over it, and I’m not making Jeff Bezos and Amazon richer than what they already are. Everyone is going to say just go digital with movies. Ok, that is fine, but I like putting a movie into my Blu-Ray player or my home entertainment system to enjoy at home with the great sounds. You don’t get that with a streaming service.
Also I hate, I hate with a passion when the movie stalls and that spinning circle drives me bonkers. Nothing is worse than a movie stalling right when you get into the movie. Also you can ONLY store so much in these digital libraries before you lose storage space. What are you going to start deleting movies that you purchased? I want to have things as part of my collection.
There are items that I have which are collectors items that you cannot find anymore. Guess what, you cannot have that digitally, and it frustrates me to the core. There are those of us who still like to purchase things and we don’t want things just in the cloud. Hey retailers we have people who want to buy things.
