Rent, Buy or Steal?

What Would Bob Do? - Colin Hay (mp3)

Blockbuster closed again. This is the third store in our area to shut down in the last year or so, and this one was close to our house.

When the previous one closed down, I asked the manager at this one how long she thought they’d survive, and she said, “Oh, there’s no plans to downsize us. We’re doing fairly well all things considered. We’ll be here a while.”

Apparently “a while” equals about half a year.

The two streams of commerce and popular culture continue to collide in strange and unprecedented ways as we try and figure out this concept called CONTENT.

When I buy the latest Matt Nathanson album on mp3, what do I own? What did I pay for?
When I buy a Kindle book, what do I own?
When I buy Season 1 of Archer on Amazon, what did I pay for?

Why do we, collectively, seem more comfortable owning books, renting movies, and stealing music?

When they have increasingly all just become slightly different versions of pop culture content? Rent, Buy or Steal?

These aren't new questions, but it fascinates me that I still don't quite know how to answer them, and I consider myself well past the midway point on the TechnoBell Curve.

Almost everyone I know who likes but doesn't love music spends 80% of their music time on Pandora. They don't have to buy anything, and they get to listen to something akin to the radio, and they don't have to make but a few decisions to do it.

People of all religions and income levels, with all levels of music love, steal music. They even call it "stealing music" and seem minimally bothered by it, apparently because it's not as blatantly wrong as walking into John Cusack's music store and physically having to enact the Five-Finger Discount. "Data Transfer" just doesn't sound as criminal.

This happens with movies, too, of course, but the film industry seems to have done a better job of getting ahead of the curve by giving consumers who prefer being honorable (and I think most consumers are like this) options to watch movies via the Internet without excessive cost.

At least three of every four friends of mine is on Netflix... for now. The ability to watch digital streams of unlimited movies and TV shows through the computer totally tipped the scales. Music has these options: Rhapsody, Napster, and the new kid to the US party, Spotify. But people don't seem quite as willing to pay rent for music rights.

Maybe it's about digestion. The longer it takes you to get through the content experience, the more obligated we feel, culturally, to own it. Books take the longest, so we still feel like it's only right to buy them. Songs mostly run five minutes or less, the equivalent of a few pages in a novel, so we don't feel so badly about just stealing them or trading them with friends like baseball cards. Movies, falling somewhere in the middle and not frequently re-experienced by the average fan, get rented.

I only know I feel like I'm somehow falling behind. One of my favorite pasttimes was to walk into Blockbuster, rifle through their Previously Viewed aisles looking for their best "2 for $20" or "4 for $20" offerings, and biting off a few fingernails while wondering if the DVDs I had picked out were really worth my 20 bucks. Two-thirds of the time, I'd walk back out with nothing and feel like I'd earned some small, meaningless moral victory of fiscal responsibility.

But those times when I do buy, the movies go home with me, and they get added to my ebbing and flowing bookshelf row of Movies To Watch, and I lovingly stack them and plan for my next late night viewing experience.

I was so distraught over Blockbuster's closure that I drove straight to Best Buy and bought the first two seasons of The West Wing, a show I've never seen, for $14.99 each. That's, like, $0.75 an episode, and I'd totally pay $1 to cut the 20 minutes of advertising out of any TV show I watched and to be able to watch it whenever I felt like it. This is a universally true statement.

I took home 45 episodes. They're mine. I own them. I'm an owner. I like owning things despite the flaws in the approach. My collection of some 200 DVD movies and some 20 boxes of TV shows loses value every day even as I cherish my ability to obsess over something as meager and laughable as DVDs, something that will one day be mentioned in the same breath as VHS.

But I've never been comfortable with renting. No matter how practical, it just doesn't feel right to me. Something about knowing it's mine, and that I acquired it legally and properly, and that it will always be there until I choose to get rid of it, that all just feels better to me.

Digital Hoarding

Faded Paper Figures--"Invent It All Again" (mp3)

Do you do it, too? Is it in your mind, this notion that you've got to have everything possible stored up on the latest digital device, in case of either the Apocalypse or terminal boredom?

In any event, it's happening again. This time with the IPhone 4. No sooner do I get the thing registered and up and running than I am scouring the Internet looking for things to load onto it. I've had it 3 days; I've already amassed over 40 Apps. Using them, I can do everything on the phone from tune my guitar and transfer money to my children (why don't they ever transfer it to me?) to find recipes for mixed drinks to locating and listening to any NPR station in the country live.

I have not listened to NPR for years. I am a digital hoarder.

I think it probably started way back with the Walkman, the one that played cassette tapes. Well, maybe before that. It might have started when we got our first VHS player. At that time, we started taping everything on a timer, to watch later or when we got home from work, things like Live Aid in its entirety, All My Children (we have never watched a soap opera before or since), movies off of HBO, and episodes of Miami Vice. You start out taping what you are going to watch later that day; you end up taping things you might watch some time, possibly. And the Walkman was the same way. Given this chance to make some portion of a massive record collection portable, I had to have mixtapes, explorations of individual artists for "deep listening," and stuff from friends that might make it into the personal canon. It always had to be some combination of what I loved (but not too much, cause I might get tired of it), what I had bought recently, and what I hadn't really listened to.

Years later, I threw out bags of both kinds of tapes. Heat and time had taken their toll, and even if they hadn't, there was no way left to watch or listen to them.

Portable CD players presented their own set of problems. More portable than records, but still an overlapping collection, the traveling version of CD pleasure involved

In recent years, it's gotten really bad. A good 60% of the music I own on CD is now located on one Ipod, which also carries a good portion of music from other sources--Itunes, eMusic, blogs, burns from friends, free downloads here and there, etc. As I've mentioned on these pages before, there is no way to even begin to listen to it, and I am thousands of songs beyond what I had then. It is impossible to even know what's on there. I only find out when I look for a song and it isn't. But I feel some weird kind of security knowing that I have it with me at all times, that at my fingertips is most anything I want to listen to, and that it will be there regardless of whether there is Internet access, Wifi, 3G, or even, for a good period of time, electrical power. Nope, it's stored and safe and always accessible (barring Ipod glitches, of course) like the supplies in a 1950's nuclear attack bomb shelter.

Of course, I've got a good bit of bit backed up on a portable hard drive.

And now, for some reason, even that record collection shrunk to a CD collection shrunk to a pocket-sized device feels obselete. Now, I'm allowing, nay wanting, other devices to compete for my attention. I've done everything I've already described to you with my Kindle, only this time in terms of books. I have classic books I'll never read, books I'm reading, books I want to read, books I've bought but probably won't read, books I've started and gotten distracted from (not a good sign) and even weird things like a cookbook I wrote a few years ago and have now converted to Kindle. Plus, though it has slow Internet, because it is 3G, I know I can access email almost anywhere, so I always feel connected.

And now, too, the Iphone, which, in my brief experience, has made the computer itself obselete for everything except word processing. Everything else can be accomplished with at least a decent level of convenience on the Iphone. Including the Ipod. Now, I'm looking at my old Ipod and my new Iphone and thinking, 'You know, Bob, all you really need is a trimmed down collection of songs that you can carry with you on your phone. Any thing else, if you need it, you can buy it with the push of a button.'

And so it goes. I may or may not be extreme, but I know I'm not alone. We want to have our worlds with us at all times, with access to everybody, every memory (at least through pictures), and everything we like to do. At least in some partial way, we want to be able to reach into our pockets and write, listen to, or display something that says, "This is my life. This is who I am."

Part of my hoarding comes from not ever wanting to be caught with nothing to do, but I have to admit that just sitting and thinking no longer seems to qualify as an acceptably pasttime, based on all of the preparations I've been making. What are those preparations for? Is it a day at the mall in a comfortable chair and any or all of my interests with me while my girls shop? Or is it a preparation for something more terrible, some awful event or some inevitable dance with loneliness? I don't really know, but I seem to want to be ready.