Once upon a time and in another life, I ran the Media department at a BestBuy. It was basically the entertainment department, responsible for movies, video games and music along with some assorted electronics (MP-3 players, karaoke machines, E-book readers etc.). It encompassed almost half the store and despite being considered the poor cousin to the Computer and Home Theatre departments, it was responsible for a huge portion of the store’s customer traffic (which is why it took so much real estate).
I wouldn’t have run any other section in the store. But having said that, it was an enormous pain in the ass. We had shelves that ran the length the entire department full of thousands upon thousands of CDs and video games, which all had to be carefully sorted and alphabetized according to painstaking corporate standards.. Those alone swallowed enormous amounts of time, usually because after you managed to get a display completed, there was a customer right behind you eager to trash the whole thing just to browse.
But the product that demanded the most attention was easily the movies. On top of all the music and video games, we also had tens of thousands of DVDs and Blu-rays crammed into a dozen shelving units taller than most basketball players.
Keeping the movie section in proper order was a constant, perpetually losing battle. And it wasn’t just the sheer demand of the stock and the company’s display standards that made us want to yank our hair out. You know how parents always lecture their children to look with their eyes and not their hands? To NOT touch everything they see or like or want? It would have been great if they followed their own advice. You never truly realize how many people haven’t a clue what the alphabet is until you’ve watched grown adults struggle to find where the movies starting with C are. Or genuinely think that titles starting with S go before A.
One of our biggest pet peeves was spending half an hour searching for the single copy of some obscure movie we were supposed to have in stock, finding it in storage where we had to get down on all fours or on top of a ladder to retrieve it only to have the customer in question hand it back with a “Thanks, I only wanted to see what it looked like.” It always made you wonder if prison was worth it.
Here’s an observation from years of dealing with the public; some adults are far needier, far messier and far less behaved than your average toddler.
Like I said, Media easily attracted the most traffic. People would be lined up the day a new Star Wars collector’s set or season of Seinfeld hit the shelves. There were riots whenever we got the new limited edition James Bond, complete with a collectible toy car. Whenever there was a new Harry Potter release, my quarterly bonus was almost guaranteed.
And Christmas? Forget it. Customers were scrambling to get movies to go in stockings and under the tree. We could literally bring out boxes of new releases and leave them on the floor and it would only take customers a few minutes to pick them clean. And when we made Two-for-One bins on Boxing Day? I still have facial twitches.
All of that was a long winded way to say that the home release market was once hotter than a super nova. In 2005, DVD and Blu-Ray sales totalled over sixteen billion dollars in the United States alone. At one point physical media accounted for nearly two thirds of America’s home entertainment market. The industry was so lucrative that studios openly mused about distributing movies strictly through home releases instead of the traditional theatrical model (ironically enough, you could replace “home release” in that sentence with “streaming” and you’d have the exact same conversation today).
Along with video games, the home entertainment market was considered a recession proof industry (until the great collapse of 2009 came along and proved all of that wrong).
Shortly after the global economic meltdown, Media was broken up onto smaller pieces and shoehorned into other departments. In a post-recession world, slashing jobs was BestBuy’s survival strategy. Even after the initial blood letting, layoffs became an annual tradition (usually happening around April to coincide with the new fiscal year). My supervisor position was a casualty of the consolation and shortly after that the annual wave of layoffs eventually caught up to me. I’m a sentimental type and it was years before I could set foot in a BestBuy again, no matter how much I missed many of my co-workers.
But one fateful afternoon I found myself walking past the store where I once worked and impulsively decided to see what my old stomping grounds looked like.
And my jaw promptly met the floor.
The Media department, which occupied nearly half of a warehouse sized store, had vanished. The video game section, which took up half the department on its own and was once considered the company’s next gravy train, was reduced to a few consoles and a handful of games shoved into a corner. The music department (which was on its way out before I was shown the door) was now basically some Apple and Spotify gift cards hanging by the cash registers. All the other gadgets and toys were either scattered to the four winds or gone completely.
But the most shocking change was the movies. Gone were the mammoth shelves that towered over the entire store. The once proud and imposing section was reduced to a small glass display case sitting next to a maintenance access. It had one shelf for Marvel stuff, another for Star Wars, a third for Pixar and couple for everything else.
In a digital world, the once white hot home release market has become a dinosaur trying to outrun an asteroid. Sales of digital movie media have have plummeted 86 percent since 2008 and businesses that depended on it to survive now teeter on the brink.
So it shouldn’t have come as a surprise when it was recently hinted that Warner Bros. might start phasing out physical home releases beginning in 2022. If they do, other major studios won’t be far behind.
That’s hardly good news for movie collectors (or a sentimental types like yours truly). And while there are no doubt some stalwarts who will see this as an invitation to rail against the policies of movie studios while extolling the virtues of physical media, who plan on fighting it with every ounce of their strength and every decibel of their voice, change is inevitable. Nothing’s more honest that cold numbers and they never lie. But while the market has shrunk considerably, physical media is not going the way of the dinosaur. At least just not yet. We’ve seen this story before and we already know how it goes.
Don’t forget that the music industry was facing extinction at the turn of the millennium. CD sales collapsed overnight as file sharing erased the big labels’ monopoly on music distribution. The industry desperately tried to fend off change in both the courts of law and public opinion, but victories in the legal arena were long and costly while amounting to nothing in the long run. Meanwhile all the attempts to win the hearts and minds of consumers were miserable failures (music labels did do a lot to alienate their customers). Today the music industry exists almost exclusively in the digital world.
Almost . . .
In case you hadn’t noticed, there has been a massive resurgence of the vinyl market. Music connoisseurs always lamented the death of the LP and have been overjoyed to see it’s return. And judging by the numbers, vinyl isn’t going away anytime soon.
Sales of vinyl LPs have seen an annual increase every year since 2005. That is an unheard of sales trend in our boom or bust economy. Even Apple doesn’t see that kind of consistent growth. And if that fact took you off guard, make sure you’re socks are on extra tight for this next tidbit; LP sales accounted for 46 percent of all album sales in the U.S. in 2020.
There’s now a thriving secondary market as a result. You can price, trade and sell original Pink Floyd and Michael Jackson albums alongside Taylor Swift and the soundtracks of MCU films. You can walk into an electronics store (like BestBuy) to pick up a high end record player for your home theatre set up. Or you can buy a basic turntable just about anywhere if you’re looking to dip a toe in the resurrected industry.
Vinyl will never be as big as it once was. Or even as big as CDs were when that market began violently contracting. But it has become a successful niche market catering to collectors and aficionados. You can buy LPs through big box retailers or get something more specific through specialty music stores, along with plenty of accessories to keep your collection clean and safely stored.
That’s the future of physical media for movies. You’ll always be able to get a DVD or a Blu-Ray or a 4K version of a title, but you’ll just have to go through a specific retailer to get it. You’ll probably still be able to get it in both a regular edition or a special one that comes with a prestige art book and a collectible or two. The physical media market is still shrinking and will never be more than a fraction of what it once was. And what remains will shift to cater to serious fans and hardcore collectors.
I used to take great pride in my movie collection (being surrounded by movies at work and having a staff discount didn’t hurt). But I can’t remember the last time I bought a movie for myself. Netflix, DisneyPlus, Amazon Prime and Crave pretty much have all my bases covered (though the fact none of them stream The West Wing is a crime against humanity). Outside of gifts, I just don’t need to buy movies any longer. It wasn’t a conscious choice, rather a gradual change in how I consume entertainment (but rest assured, I’m still going to live at the movie theatre when that’s a thing again).
Change is a constant predator that strikes when you’re too comfortable or complacent. It is as merciless as it is hungry and nothing escapes it for long. But sometimes it leaves something behind. Definitely something smaller than the bloated creature it was before, but also something leaner, tougher and more agile. Something more likely to survive in a dramatically new world.
We saw it happen with music. Now we’re likely seeing it happen with movies.
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