Sales of physical DVDs shrank 20% every year for over a decade. Until last year.
Last year the industry shrank just 9%. But here’s the kicker: 4K UHD DVD sales jumped 12%.
It’s not just movies. Print magazine launches are up 15%. Book sales are climbing after years of decline. Vinyl records are flying off shelves. Film photography purchases are spiking. Even board game sales are rising.
Americans are walking away from screens — and walking back to the physical world.
“Sales of physical media like DVDs shrank consistently 20% year over year … until last year. The industry shrank 9% last year. Sales of 4K UHD DVDs were up 12%.”
The reason? Physical media is objectively better.
Streaming services push 15-25 megabits per second to your TV at their highest premium settings. Sometimes as high as 40. Modern HD Blu-ray displays at 128 mb/s.
You own the disc. You don’t subscribe to it. You don’t lose access when a platform pulls the title. You don’t pay Apple a monthly fee to listen to a song you already bought.
Ownership beats subscription every single time.
The cognitive benefits run deeper. A recent study found that turning physical pages helps your brain map the topography of a story — and it takes less mental bandwidth to do it.
Reading on a Kindle or tablet forces the brain to work harder to track where you are in the narrative. You’re more tired and more distracted after 10 pages on a screen than after 10 pages in an actual book.
AdTech firms discovered readers are 70% more likely to remember a physical ad they held in their hands than one they saw on a website.
That’s why print magazine advertising is growing again.
The trend extends beyond entertainment. Public schools are banning devices at tidal levels — textbooks and chalkboards are making a comeback. Dozens of startups are now marketing dumb phones that only do texting and calls. Some have hundreds of thousands of users.
Normal people are going back to checking email and Facebook when they sit down at a desktop computer — a habit that hasn’t been mainstream in at least 20 years.
Board games are up too. People want an excuse to sit in front of other people, live and in color. Church attendance is rising. Maybe online communities were always just a poor substitute for actual communion.
HBO is betting big on the trend. The network is releasing a $150 remastered box set of “The Sopranos” this December for the holidays.
That’s a massive bet. It’s likely to pay off.
Tech companies will fight this shift. But humans are flesh and blood. The metaverse isn’t where we live. It never will be.
As one digital meme puts it: touch grass.
In light of all this, maybe that phrase is more illuminating than anyone realized.
