We've looked at your overall situation with physical data and media, and then specifically at papers and photos and whether (and how) to digitize them. For this last installment, I want to explore what's possible with music and movies.
With the Thanksgiving holiday approaching here in the US later this week, I'll try to keep it short so we can all focus on spending time with friends and family in the coming days.
Analog Week 4: Music and Movies
I want to preface this discussion by acknowledging that for many people, a music or movie collection is a special thing--something you've spent lots of time and money building, a carefully curated representation of your tastes in entertainment. I'm not here to tell you to get rid of it (or even to digitize it and then get rid of it). Everyone gets to decide how much of their space to devote to physical media, and for what reasons, whether logical or sentimental or anything else.
This week's post is mainly for those of you who are already leaning towards making your physical media take up less space. Maybe you don't need drawers of cassette tapes, racks of CDs, or shelves upon shelves of DVDs or Blu-Ray discs anymore. Or, maybe you're staring at a box full of unique personal video, especially home movies. What are your options?
Switch to Streaming Services
Predictably, if you're dealing with commercially produced music or movies, one option is to switch to streaming services that provide the same content. Platforms like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Apple Music, and Spotify cover the vast majority of most content that most of us want to consume. There are some obvious reasons not to do this, of course:
- Your collection includes many rare items not found on streaming platforms
- Your internet connection is not that great and doesn't provide a good viewing/listening experience
- You built your collection specifically because you wanted to watch without depending on anything other than your own stuff
These are reasonable concerns. However, many (if not most) of us likely don't worry too much about these reasons. We've simply accumulated a lot of media over time because we wanted it, or because other options weren't available. In these cases, what do you really stand to lose by ditching your entire movie or CD collection and relying on Spotify or Apple Music instead?
Notice that "streaming services are too expensive" is not on that least of obvious reasons above. This is because if you have a media collection large enough to aggravate you about how much space it takes up, it almost certainly cost far more than the streaming services you might replace it with.
For example, let's take Spotify's current $12/month rate for a premium individual plan. That's $144/year, or $720 over five years. Let's then assume that your music collection contains 200 CDs, with an average cost of $10 each. That's about 14 years (!!) of that Spotify subscription. You can drastically improve this ratio by involving a spouse in your Spotify subscription ($16/month for 2, or $8/mo each) or a family ($20/month for 6, or $3.34/mo each). Or, if you're willing to put up with ads, you can get much of the same experience with the free tier of many music platforms.
The same logic applies to movies and platforms like Netflix or Hulu. Admittedly, there is some fragmentation about which platforms have which movies. But if you have a sizeable movie collection, the math still probably works out in your favor even if you need to subscribe to more than of them to maintain access to everything you want. And for the titles not present in the main libraries on those platforms, you'll likely still save plenty of money (and space!) by digitally renting whatever obscure titles you want for $3 or $4 on the rare occasions you want to watch them.
After all, if you're not watching the content, what's the point in having it--physically or otherwise?
In any case, you can always sell your physical media off to someone who values it more than the space they'll need to store it. Throw that cash into a SmartyPig account and use it to pay for your streaming services. Space recovered, convenience attained...win-win!
Digitize It!
Another great option is to digitize your physical media, just like we discussed with paper and photos. This is significantly easier if you start with "pre-digitized" formats like CDs and DVDs rather than true analog formats like vinyl, cassette tapes, or VHS tapes, but you can do it with anything. The analog formats just require more specialized hardware for conversion. You can even convert vinyl records directly to digital audio with the use of a purpose-built digital turntable. Or, as in the cases we've already discussed, you can pay someone else to do it for you.
Most people don't realize that converting physical digital media like CDs or DVDs to files on your computer is easy. This process is commonly known as "ripping." The big question is whether or not it's legal. The rules here are arcane and, in some cases, objectively ridiculous. You're allowed to have a digital backup copy of physical media you own. But you're not technically allowed to circumvent digital copy protection mechanisms that would allow you to make said backup copy--even though it's trivially easy and many popular (and also technically legal) software packages exist to do it. You can even make those digital copies easy to watch on your own devices with a platform like Plex or Kodi.
Practically speaking, making digital backup copies (for yourself) of physical media you've already bought (for yourself) will put you on precisely nobody's legal radar. Make of that what you will.
Home Video Considerations
If you're mainly concerned with home movies, that's a different story--one that has no confounding legal backdrop, but one that might require more work and/or hardware, especially if you have magnetic media like VHS, MiniDV, or 8mm tables. Converting these formats requires a playback device (e.g. old-school VCR) as well as a digital capture device and software to capture and edit video.
Decades ago, VCRs were plentiful and digital capture hardware was expensive. Now, the capture hardware is dirt cheap, but it's challenging to find a good-quality VCR anywhere! Unless you have lots of free time and many videos to digitize, this is one area where it might make sense to pay for a service like Forever Studios or LegacyBox. (I have not utilized either of these services personally, but I've heard from people that had positive experiences with both.)
Digitizing your media might still seem like a daunting task, even if you've decided you want to do it. If that's where you are right now, please reach out with any questions about how to get started (or proceed, if you're stuck), and I'll be happy to get you going again.
For now, happy Thanksgiving if you're celebrating it this week, and happy (analog) data-taming!