Dan Levine loves watching his guests light up when they see his DVD-lined bookcases and drawers in his Brooklyn apartment. It’s as if they’ve traveled back in time to 2006, he said. “It is a really powerful thing to show that I still take pride in owning things that make me happy,” Levine said.
The 30-year-old estimates he has over 500 DVDs. And that’s not including his modest collections of CDs, VHS tapes, vinyl records, cassettes and 8-tracks. Since the 2010s, streaming has dominated media consumption, and with that, sales of DVDs and CDs have sunk.
And yet discs are still circulating in retail, and in some cases, demand is reviving – particularly from collectors. Discogs, an online marketplace for physical music where users can also catalogue their personal collections, saw CD purchases increase 8% so far this year over last year. The trend is driven by Gen Z looking for the novelty of “vintage” media on discs as well as collectors and millennials itching to ditch their pricey streaming services, experts say.
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They also want to exercise true ownership of their media and better support the artists they love. And it can be cheaper to buy a physical DVD for $3 to $5 than to buy or rent the digital version. Some buyers hope their collections will also grow in value.
“What’s driving the growth right now is the type of people who go and spend a lot of time buying physical music are also hoping that the music might appreciate over time,” said Lloyd Starr, chief operating officer at Discogs. DVDs are making a comeback as people lean towards wanting to own their media. More broadly, the decline in disc sales is stabilising, note industry groups, physical media distributors and sellers.
Sales of DVDs, Blu-rays and 4K UHD Blu-rays, for example, fell just 3% in the third quarter over last year, according to the trade organisation Digital Entertainment Group, compared to almost 26% in the previous year. And CD unit sales in 2024 increased 1.5% year over year, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. Old-style entertainment is making a comeback for the novelty and other factors, as people discover the advantages of physically owning their media.
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