Collecting in Protest!

I'm a hoarder...I mean, collector. Ask my friends, my family, my wife...they'll all agree. I am a habitual collector of stuff. Though I say that as a joke, in reality this condition is anything but funny. There are many people in the world that suffer from far more serious cases of hoarding. But, any habit or pattern that threatens to negatively impact one's life is serious enough to address. But, I'm now finding myself in a situation where the shifts of modern society are causing my issue to become a self-healing problem. We live in an age of digital downloaded games, iTunes/MP3 libraries, and more streaming services than anyone can possibly afford. We have instant content in the palm of our hands anywhere we go and if we ever desire something, it's a simple touchscreen tap away. We don't even have to go the store anymore! We can order our clothes, our housewares, and our food on the internet and have it all delivered to our door without ever even having to change out of our pajamas. It's a wonderous world...but why does it feel so hollow now? Let's talk about the digital revolution and what it means for us old-school collectors.

My earliest collecting habits started with Hot Wheels and action figures. Items that I had adventures with my father going into Wal-Marts, dollar stores, and toy stores to find. I can still remember the excitement I had digging through blister packs of cars looking for the last car I needed to complete a series...and the pure joy of finally finding it at the bottom of a bin or on the back of a peg hook. The search was my journey and I prized the toy we found as my trophy of a quest completed. But, I soon grew up and began to enjoy music more than toys. Now, I didn't crave the hunt for tiny cars or figurines so much. Instead, I took up the hunt for CDs. I loved the bargain bin at Hastings and the dusty, used albums at garage sales and thrift shops. My music collection grew at an alarming rate. I was a young audiophile, and I treasured my library of music. This memory is what finally unlocked my feelings towards my modern digital music library. Why, when I have access to more music than I could have ever dreamed of as a kid, am I so lost and bored with music now? I think it's a combination of having too many choices and no journey to finding anything new.

But, how can having more music at my fingertips than ever before mean I don't have a journey of finding music anymore? I connect this phenomenon with having multiple streaming services and feeling like there's nothing to watch, or having hundreds of digital games on the PlayStation Network and feeling like there's nothing I want to play. We've over saturated the media world to the point that nothing stands out amongst the flood of choices. And, if nothing stands out, then nothing will stand the test of time...nothing will get remembered. Back in the classic rock era, it took a band being good in order to be noticed and for a record company to put the time and effort into printing physical vinyl albums of your music. There were fewer choices and the choices offered were all vetted to be good music. Cassette tapes were more cost effective to make, and allowed labels to take more risks with the bands they produced. Then came the advent of the CD. Now that music was digitized, CDs could be made at a staggering speed for significantly less cost. Now, it was easier than ever to get your music on a CD and out to listeners. But, more and more CDs failed to make a big impact and instead drifted off into obscurity. Soon after CDs became the standard music medium, the .mp3 plugin was leaked and now anyone could create a digital library of music shared freely among the fans....Napster was born.... Now everyone had access to a vast library of music with no monetary investment and no journey of discovery. This was the start of the media downfall in my opinion.

At this point, the value of the artist as well as the art they created was slashed to practically nothing. Nobody was buying music anymore. At this point, the music industry pushed back with iTunes and other "official" means of downloading music. As free file sharing was shut down by legal challenges, the music industry started to grow in the new digital space it had created. Now, music could be produced and the mp3s could be stored in a cloud and downloaded directly. There was now zero cost to putting albums into the hands of consumers. No more physical media was needed. So, the digital revolution kicked in again. If an artist or band couldn't catch the attention of a studio to get their music posted online, they could do it themselves. Websites like Bandcamp and YouTube made it so anyone could produce their own music and put it out into the world to sell or stream. Seems like a creative utopia, doesn't it? Well, the freedom to create came with a side effect: the flood of content and choice-paralysis.

Now that anyone can create media and compete in the same arena as the big name labels, that means that everyone from Beyoncé to The Wiggles, and Led Zeppelin to Rebecca Black (if you know, you know) are in the same place, competing to be noticed. Now, it's easier than ever to strike out on a journey for something new and be buried under a mountain of garbage while searching for an elusive talented artist. It's the proverbial search for a needle in a haystack. This pertains to the worlds of movies and video games as well. We now live in a world with terrible rip-offs of mainstream movies and useless cash-grab games flooding all of our devices. It seems, every time I look at the Nintendo Switch Store, I have to dig through a hundred "indie games" that may or may not be worth the space they take up on my SD card just to find one or two games that are worth my time. And, I won't even get started on the Android App Store. Anymore, I have trouble finding games that will even start. And if they do start, they're full of banners and ads. It's shameful really.

But pulling back to my original point. I'm a collector and I don't see that changing anytime soon. The digital revolution tried its best to change my mind, but the more I see the piles and piles of shovelware, fake movies, and untalented artists, the more sure I am of my good ol' physical media collection. I think the music, movie, and video game industries need to take a step back and give themselves a good long look. The quantity over quality approach is killing our desire to continue being paying customers. It's killing the joy and magic of what these once great industries produce. Thankfully, I think more and more people are waking up and seeing this trend for what it is. With the recent collapse of the Star Wars franchise and the currently crumbling Marvel studios, people have begun to notice. With the ever rotating and changing list of pop icons that are everything today and nothing a week from now, people have begun to notice. And with the constant flow of cheap, predatory games that deceive and leach money out of their players, people have FINALLY begun to notice. So, hold onto those physical collections and keep those systems running. One of these days when the servers go offline and the internet is out, I'll still be rocking out to my CDs, watching my DVDs and enjoying my game collection...cause I'm a collector and I'll always GAME ON!