Zappykins said:
When All Digital musice came out it would take people hours to download music - as most people were on dial up. Still it's grown and taken over.
Music is consumed differently from movies and games. The basic unit of music is the song, while an album is just a collection of songs recorded at the same time. With only a few exceptions, albums aren't necessarily intended to be consumed as a whole unit, hence the existence of singles. While people still frequently choose to buy full albums, many if not most people may only desire to buy the one or two songs they do like. Digital made that much more cost-effective. Furthermore, people frequently listen to music on the go, whether it's in the car or when engaged in walking, bicyclicing, or other forms of exercise (I'd really like to see someone do a consumer survey on how much music is listened to at home and away from home so there would be concrete numbers), and the advent of the mp3 player allowed people to bring entire libraries of content with them while on the go. Music was primarily single-driven up until the 60s, when music became more album-driven (a change spurred initially by bands like The Beatles and Led Zeppelin), but the advent of digital downloads helped facilitate a shift back to a single-driven market, and now streaming has basically become the new radio. Still, when people do buy whole albums, they still prefer physical formats, and digital didn't even surpass physical until 2011. Plus, newer popular music tends to be geared towards the young, who tend to be more likely to avail themselves of devices that can play mp3s.
Meanwhile, movies are treated as singular units, and even TV shows, despite being divided into discrete episodes, are likewise intended to be enjoyed as an entire unit (esp. serials and other programs with an overarching plot). Furthermore, movies are an audio-visual medium, not just purely audio like music. They are intended to be viewed either at the theater or at home on your TV. I would assume that very few people regularly consume home video away from home, and unless they're a passenger they aren't going to avail themselves of TVs installed in automobiles. Similar to movies, "AAA" console games are also sold as singular units and intended to be consumed at home on the TV.
Because its nature as a medium differs so greatly from movies and games, we cannot directly compare music to those other media. The same rules do not apply. Music lent itself greatly to a physical-to-digital transition (same for the print periodical; for example, IGN and GameSpot are far superior to monthly magazines like EGM as a means of disseminating video game news as they can be updated in real time and can offer videos as well as words and images). Because of the way they consume music, people had an actual incentive to switch. There is much less incentive for movies (digital can serve as part of the new rental scheme alongside kiosks like Redbox) and especially games. Digital full games especially offer no real benefits over physical copies. Just because most consumers of music use digital now doesn't mean that movies and games are next in line. Some analysts tried applying that same "if music, then..." logic to e-books, saying print books would be dead or dying by now, yet print books are still going strong and e-book sales have already begun to stagnate.
I do agree with you, they are old tech that died. But I would say the same about Blu-ray. It's a dead or dying tech. It's 10 years old, and still can't even dominate over verabled DVD players. Look at the top 12, in most of the sales, the DVD sells TWICE what the Blu-ray does:
Simply pointing at market share at the present time doesn't establish Blu-ray as a "dying" technology. That market share has actually been growing over time, and not just because DVD sales are declining. Blu-ray sales have been growing over time. Maybe not as fast as DVD, but DVD was the most rapidly-adopted consumer electronic of the past 70 years, reaching 80+% saturation far more quickly than TV, color TV, cable, VCRs, and cell phones. It's hardly a fair comparison. Still, Blu-ray sales have been growing, with unit sales going from 22 million discs in 2009 (source: DEG) to 122 million in 2013 (source: IHS). This hasn't been enough to stop the slow decline of the overall home video market, and Blu-ray still hasn't surpassed DVD yet (at least not in the U.S.), but nevertheless Blu-ray is growing, not dying.
However, there are still some obstacles that could be responsible for the slower growth of Blu-ray compared to DVD. As nearly every household in America had a color TV when the first commercial DVD players debuted in 1997, there were no obstacles keeping DVD from maximizing its penetration in a short time, plus DVDs were superior in nearly every way to VHS, boasting not only better picture and audio but also lower prices and no more tracking knobs or rewinding tapes. Buying movies on home video became a much more appealing prospect to consumers of the late 90s and early 00s. However, HDTV is still not universally adopted, and with a market penetration of about 80%, one out of every five U.S. households are lacking one (1080p TV penetration could be even lower, as it's still not standard, which could be a further obstacle). When Blu-ray first came out in 2006, and even when the format war between itself and HD-DVD was over just two years later, HDTV penetration was considerably lower (34% in 2008 according to one source). By definition, people can't use an HD home video format without an HD television. Currently, Blu-ray penetration has grown to only about 65% of all households after 8 years on the market, or about 80% of all HDTV households. That yields about 75 million U.S. households with a Blu-ray player (by comparison, there are only 42 million Netflix subscribers in the U.S.). Strong, but not DVD strong.
Furthermore, there are more options for consuming movies that one may not necessarily want to buy right away than there were 15 years ago, including HD VOD as well as cheaper and more convenient rental options (you can rent from the Redbox around the corner for just $2, as opposed to driving halfway across town to rent from Blockbuster for $5 like we used to), and even Netflix provides a grab bag of (mostly older) movies that are continually rotated in and out of service. At the turn of the century few people had good enough internet to stream anything (and there weren't any legit streaming sites anyway), VOD wasn't yet a thing (Comcast's On Demand service didn't launch until 2003), and your options for viewing movies at home were either buy, rent, or wait for it to come on TV. The market is more diversified with more options, so people might not feel as much compulsion to buy outright. That being said, the home video market in general and the Blu-ray market in specific are not in trouble, and Blu-ray is most definitely not dying. It's just not the juggernaut DVD was.
|
