HMV go into administration for the 2nd time in 6 years

I'm always surprised by how many people pay for something that only has digital form that they can get for free prefectly legally and easily (there are slightly easier, illegal methods too, of course).

It's the hard copy that has the real value but people still choose to pay money for digital. It's crazy and has been hitting the high street really hard.

You could easily buy online but you won't because you have loyalty to the high street . The majority of people buy online. A shop can't sustain itself on a few people that happen to like buying in person. Majority rules.

I mean yeah, you understand market mechanisms. That doesn't mean they cannot have negative wider effects. I rent dvds from my local library. Someone has to be making money from physical entities for libraries to be a thing. Most legit ways of getting media from the internet screw your personal ownership and autonomy over the thing you consume.

There is always jolly rodgering I suppose.

Perhaps a stupid question, but aren't libraries owned by the government? So any money they produce gets put back into the library? (That's what I've always assumed libraries were for!)

Yeah but someone has to make the dvds don't they? ANd why do they make the dvds? For profit. The government does not make films and thier physical forms of distribution (well not yet anyway, comrade ).

Libraries are bascially where the government buys media from the private sector, eg books, and lets the public borrow that media for free or at a cheap rate. I suppose there is no reason why a goverment could not make and lend it's own media it has made itself, I guess BBC stuff is like this in a way, but we live in a mixed economy mostly. A mixture of public and private ownership.

If no private company can make money from selling physical media, eg films and books, then there will be no dvds and books for libraries to fill themselves with

This doesn't have to be a problem, but there is a tendancy for private companies to infect thier products with digital rights management. It gets much harder to share stff when it on things like netflix or a media product is tied to some account on a platform, such as Steam for video games. Libraries and sharing basically die then.

This is also bad news if you like music. Spotify, Apple Music etc are destroying the ability for musicians to live off their art. Beeb did a breakdown of a typical album royalties few years back: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-23840744

So, about a quid to the artist, or 25p each for a 4 piece per album sale (they'll then have to pay producers, managers etc out of that). So, say a typical 10 track album sells 100,000 copies, that's 25k per member in a four member band. Equivalent number of streams on Spotify? A fifth of that split between all of them: https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2016/05/26/band-1-million-spotify-streams-royalties/

If you like music, buy physical media, don't enable sites like Spotify

Yo. Streaming services can go die in a hole.

I got some vinyls. The selection was quite limited really. Really would love a dedicated vinyl shop, new or second hand, where music enthusiasts can just pop in for a browse and a bargain, and play some music on the turntables. Suppose people aren't into that any more. Bloody whippersnappers

Who is actually going to do that though?

Music fans.

Then it's no surprise that HMV is about to collapse again. If you want to buy CDs then that's great, but most people just want to listen to music cheaply and easily. There's little incentive for someone to drive to the town centre, find and pay for parking, go look for what they want in HMV, buy it, take it home and get out the CD player, when you can stream pretty much anything straight away on your iPhone.

The way you have described buying a physical CD there is just silly to be honest.

There is little incentive to make an email address, sign up to Spotify, enter your card details, pay for a subscription, search for the music you want, stream it on a mobile phone with crap audio/Apple's stock headphones and at the end of it you never actually own the media you've paid money for.

How do you buy CDs? You just said you don't use Amazon.

Everyone has internet access these days, I could do all of what you said in literally a minute, as opposed to making a dedicated trip into the town centre.

What's wrong with them? Why the aggro?