Owning media again This year, one of my aspirations is to rely less on the big streaming services for my entertainment. Why? Well, for one thing, if we give too much power to large corporations by getting overly attached to their services, that leads to monopolies, inequality and ultimately, democratic decline. How’s that for a positive opening? Finding alternatives is easier said than done, because Tech Morality is Hard, and I would generalise that to “Corporate Morality is Hard”. Namely, keeping tabs on the morality of all the companies you rely on for services takes quite a lot of (ongoing) work. That said, it’s important to me to not support evil businesses and lift up the good ones, and especially, support the artists themselves (duh!). A straightforward (partial) solution would be to reduce my reliance on (a few big) companies, so that I can more easily switch to alternatives, should the need arise. In the context of entertainment—which for the scope of this post means books, video (including movies/series), and music—currently, the ideal solution to me seems to be buying DRM free files (or physical copies); ideally, directly from the creator. Another good option would be to buy second-hand and support the artists in a different way. Before I get into that, I’d like to mention that there’s one alternative that I would love to use: the public library. It’s a fantastic concept which I really would like to support: shared instead of private ownership. It’s equitable, sustainable, and public libraries are also third places that provide so much more than just multimedia loans. However, due to various reasons, it’s not feasible for me: for starters, I can’t go there (long covid). Because I live in a rural area, their physical collection is (naturally) very small (and the costs to loan from other libraries is understandably quite high). They offer e-books, but the international collection I’m after is very limited, and music can only be borrowed from a central repository (again at quite a steep cost). For me personally, I can’t justify the costs of a membership (as I would almost never make use of it), but if your situation is different, I’d encourage you to take this route instead. Unfortunately, owning my media again seems to be the best solution for me right now. I realise there are at least three problems with that: (a) you have to be able to afford it, (b) it takes more effort and in some cases, technical know-how, and (c) the material has to be available for purchase (preferable DRM free). Why DRM free? Because if the files are “protected” by Digital Rights Management, the company can revoke your access at any time. That’s not owning, it’s renting. I’ll discuss each of these problems using my own experiences so far as an example. But, spoiler alert, I haven’t figured it all out yet. Money First, let’s talk money. For books, I’m comparing a subscription service to buying e-books or second-hand physical books. In the past, I’ve made use of Kobo Plus as a subscription service: this currently costs € 12 a month. I’ve also looked at the prices of the past 75 e-books I’ve bought, the average costs per e-book was € 7. * I don’t have enough data to compare this to buying second-hand physical books yet, but based on my current experience, I think that those costs will be quite similar on average. That would mean that in my particular case, the subscription service would be cheaper if I read about two books per month (according to my stats, I read about 2.5 books per month). To me, the costs are so comparable that it’s a no-brainer to get rid of this subscription (which I already did a few months ago). * Rounded. Of course, this can vary a lot and also depends on the types of books you buy (bundles, older, just released, etc.). For music, my current subscription service is Spotify, which I’d love to get rid of for various reasons. I share a Family Plan with four other family members, the cost is € 18, or € 3.60 per person per month. That’s of course very tough to beat, however: (a) this hurts the artists, who are underpaid in this scheme, and (b) it’s only hard to beat when you continuously buy new music. Once you’ve bought an album or a collection of them, you can listen repeatedly for free. I’m lucky because I own a large collection of albums already (passed along by my Grandpa), but they’re all in one genre. I’d like to diversify, and this is a cost I’m willing to pay, while supporting the artists in the mean time. I’ve only just started building my music collection again, so far I’ve bought albums from individual artists, Bandcamp, and Qobuz (these companies could have issues I’m not aware of as well; at least they pay the artists better than Spotify). There’s also a Faircamp Webring I’ll have to check out. In my limited experience, albums costs approximately € 10-15 (individual tracks around € 1), so I have to budget this to not go overboard. The video/movies/series situation is more complicated. I currently watch media from: our public broadcasting agency (completely for free! except for the costs of my internet connection, of course), YouTube (“free”, but riddled with ads and surveillance, plus YouTube speak: like, subscribe, hit that bell!), and Netflix. Netflix is the only service I pay for: I share an account with four other family members, the costs are € 16 per month plus € 5 per month for our extra account (so € 4.20 per month per person). In an ideal world, I would be content with watching only the content from our public broadcaster, but unfortunately I’m ashamed to admit I quite enjoy some of the content on YouTube and Netflix. Some of it (movies mostly) are available for purchase, series or stuff from YouTube generally isn’t. Also, unfortunately I haven’t bought a movie in ages, so I don’t have any data to compare prices to, sadly. Availability Now that we’ve discussed the financial aspects, let’s look at the availability side of the equation. To start of with books, e-books are easily available from a wide number of stores—DRM free e-books are much harder to find. I was sad to discover that only 20% of my previously purchased e-books (almost exclusively through Kobo) were DRM free. I freely admit that I wasn’t quite aware of the DRM situation while buying those books. But even now that I am, I can’t find every book as a DRM free e-book. My current strategy is to look for that first (for example, Bookshop has a filter option for DRM free titles), and otherwise try to buy a second-hand physical copy. That only works for “older” books, of course. DRM free music is, interestingly enough, a lot easier to come by than e-books (although it’s usually not cheap). I haven’t run into any issues yet, and the second-hand CD market also seems to be quite large. These are good times for music collectors, it seems! After that good news, the situation for series/video/movies (especially video/series) is more dire. Some movies are available for purchase, but not all (think Netflix Exclusive titles, and equivalents from other streamers). For series that were made recently, I think you can forget about owning them. This makes me so sad! If the big publishers decide to not offer those series any more, are they lost forever? Let alone content created for YouTube, although there aren’t that many channels I would purchase a DVD of. However lovely it would be if more people switched to alternatives like PeerTube, I don’t see that happening any time soon. Imagine: if you could watch ad-free, with a donation link that pays the creator fairly, that would be awesome in my book. Technical/practical aspects Finally, let’s discuss the technical challenges you might encounter. The easiest are the books: if you buy them as DRM free ePub files, they can be read on a wide variety of devices, just by transferring the files. The files are small, so you can store more of them than you’ll ever be able to read. Wonderful. The music is more tricky: because the files take up more space (especially lossless formats), you may not want to replicate them to all of the devices you’d like to use for playing music. I see two solutions at least: a dedicated device with good connectivity options, audio outputs and ample of storage space (a modern “MP3 player”), or, the option I went with, self-hosting your own music streaming service. The first option is accessible to most people (again, unfortunately, only if you can afford it), while the self-hosting option is more tricky to setup if you don’t have prior experience with it. I chose Navidrome, which is very easy to setup as self-hosted apps go. * Once you’ve managed to get it going, Navidrome is amazing: it has a clean interface, many compatible apps to choose from, it’s very quick, and your music lives as simple files in folders. I use MusicBrainz Picard to organise and appropriately tag the files. * It is also available as an app on YunoHost, which is an operating system aiming to simplify server administration and therefore democratise self-hosting while making sure it stays reliable, secure, ethical and lightweight. This could make it easier to setup for non-technical people, but it’s still a lot more involved than using Spotify. The video/series/movie situation is one I still have to figure out. There are self-hosted apps available (see e.g. this list on YunoHost)—that wouldn’t be my biggest issue, as I’m comfortable with self-hosting things. My biggest issue is that I’m just not sure if I would be able to find any content to put into the system that I’d enjoy watching, and that I could get my partner to watch with me. Conclusions Oops, I got a little carried away word count-wise here… The short summary is that I have a clear idea on how to transition away from streaming services to owning my own media again for music and (e-)books. Namely, buying DRM free e-books if they are available, otherwise, I’ll search for second-hand physical copies. For music, I have yet to find an album that’s not available DRM free, so that’s easy. Plus, there are plenty of second-hand CDs/LPs etc. for sale, often with beautiful cover art and inserts. For videos/movies/series, I don’t know if I’ve found a solution that’s satisfactory to me yet… Older stuff is available on DVD, but newer releases (especially series) are hard to find, because they’re often exclusive to the streaming platform. If you have suggestions on this topic, I’m all ears! Finally, two closing thoughts. The first is: owning your media is obviously more expensive and cumbersome than paying a company so you can stream it. This is, of course, exactly what those companies are relying on. I’m able and willing to pay that price, but not everyone is in that position. It would be wonderful if I could (legally) share my media with others, but I don’t think that’s possible without hurting the artists. Obviously, folks invented public libraries to solve this problem, but in my case it’s not a feasible option, and I imagine I’m not the only one. Is the library’s digital collection limited because they need more funding to expand it and pay a fair price, or do the publishers currently overcharge the libraries? If you are more knowledgeable than me in this area, please let me know. Anyway, I think the root issue is that the publishing system is broken, in that it prioritises the companies’ needs over the well-being of the artists and fans. The last thing I’ll leave you with is this: as I wrote in a previous post, artists are truly brave and wonderful people for sharing their creations with the world. We should really treasure and support them more than we do currently: not just as individuals, but on a system level. When I think about the sheer volume of art that could be lost due to AI companies shredding books (oops, tried to avoid that topic), or series becoming unavailable due to streaming services killing them off, it’s easy to feel despondent. But this is also what those companies are relying on: apathy. So, if you are in any way capable of making a small change, please try. I won’t be perfect at this either, but giving it our best effort is all we can do. Now, excuse me while I go put my treasured albums on repeat for the umpteenth time. Thank you for reading this via RSS! View this article on my website. Replies: E-mail / Fediverse / Webmention