enkidu's Journal: Some thoughts on why I buy 10 times more DVD's than CD's

Let me preface this by saying that I have never downloaded illegal music from the internet and I don't have any plans to. I have DSL at home and on evenings, I can get 3xT1 lines at work so bandwidth isn't an issue.

Looking at my amazon orders over the last year, I see that I've ordered about 10 times more DVD's than CD's. Why? Because I feel that I get much more value for the dollar. In fact, I often buy impulse DVD's but almost never buy impulse CD's. I thought about this some and I think my preferences are completely rational from an informational standpoint.

For me at least, my entertainment budget goes to video games, movies, CD's and DVD's. For the sake of simplicity let's just consider the last two, since that's where the largest portions of my entertainment monies go (80%). From my point of view, the two categories (CD's and DVD's) are both purchased for entertainment purposes, and as such are replaceable with each other.

Now, I can buy the re-recorded soundtrack for Koyaanisqatsi for $14.99 at amazon. For just two dollars more, I can get the whole freaking movie. Lets think about this from just a pure informational standpoint.

DVD's (even single DVD's) often have 4-8 gigabytes of compressed data, while CD's have (depending on how you do the compression, let's say a completely lossless compression of 40% or so) at best 450MB of data.

So, when I buy a DVD, I get 5000 MB of information for $20 dollars (and often much more data in the case of multiple DVD releases or pay much less in the case of discount DVD's), or around 250MB/$. When I buy a CD, I pay $15 bucks for 450MB of data (which actually compresses pretty well down to 150MB or so using 192kbps lame) or 30MB/$. Now if you take into account the stuff I'm not particularly interested in seeing/hearing (the extras on the DVD or around 50% and the 8 filler crap songs out of 10 on the CD or 80%), I'm getting 125MB per dollar spent on a DVD and I'm getting 6MB per dollar on a CD. If you include the fact that I can compress my CD down (imperceptibly to me) to one third that size I'm only getting 2MB per dollar spent on a CD.

So, on average I get 125MB of entertainment information per dollar spent on DVD's vs 2MB of entertainment information per dollar spent on CD's or about 60 times more entertainment data for each dollar.

sure...

[ScioN_000]

I can't believe that someone who has such fast connections would never have downloaded any music media. Not to say that you may not have, but it is really hard to believe.

Re:sure...

[enkidu]

Well, I downloaded some of Janice Ian's tracks but they were legal. And I did look around, but most of the stuff was crap and it wasn't worth my time. An additional reason is that I don't like much of the more recent music.

interesting

[imroy]

For me at least, my entertainment budget goes to video games, movies, CD's and DVD's.

It's interesting that you bring this up. Just last month the ARIA (Australian Recording Industry Association) released a report about declining album sales in Australia. Instead of just blaming MP3's and P2P like the RIAA, the ARIA noted that the entertainment marketplace was becoming much more diverse. Consumers have things like mobile (cell) phones, DVD's, video games, and of course the internet all demanding their hard-earned money. In fact, I believe the report pointed out (or it might have been some other report) that the music sales numbers didn't include music video DVDs and that their sales have sky-rocketed.

Just something to think about :)