For the love of the physical format

Main photo by Dorien Monnens on Unsplash

Hello

Welcome again to the Mumubl.com email. My little missive this week focuses on listening habits and music formats and is accompanied in the email by a few updates from the site – the posting guidelines have been updated being the main one.

I always enjoy the feedback I get from anyone – on any aspect of the content produced at Mumubl.com so please don’t hesitate to get in touch – and of course spread the word – as Grant Nicholas sang on Feeder’s “Echo Park” album “tell all your friends”.

Thanks as always

Dave

For the love of the physical format

Recently someone said to me “who buys CD’s anymore” and in fact the answer, partly, is me, I assume there’s someone else. But in the modern world it is rather unusual, vinyl has a resurgence that is widely known but buying CDs doesn’t seem to attract the same nostalgia or love. Personally I’ve never been in love with vinyl, I don’t own a record player at the moment and my CD and cassette collection is one that has built up over the years of my youth. There are people out there though building collections of physical music without that pre existing attachment and I think the reasons for buying any physical music is similar across the board.

I generally stream then buy, once I find an album has stuck with me on streaming then I’ll probably eventually add it to my physical collection. This also gives some support to artists as well, albums sale may not be the income stream they once were but they do offer more to artists, especially independants, than streaming does. Streaming isn’t always all encompassing at times as well, I have a few purchases that were made because the music went missing from Spotify (great to see Liverpool band Silent Sleep return to Spotify recently for example).

I think there’s an escape from the all you can eat streaming in the physical format, when everything is at your fingertips it takes a discipline to listen to an album from start to finish, a listening habit that a physical format makes easier. It also eases the focus by giving you artwork and sleeve notes to read whilst you listen. Some people just love having that physical product, some people just love collecting – a well curated mp3 list or streaming album library just isn’t the same.

Whatever the reason though I’m glad to see we haven’t lost physical media completely. We may do one day, but I’m not as sure of that as I once was. Streaming is just easier, and still the place I do most of my listening, but long live physical media!

It’s a stories site – New posting guidelines

In the wake of a few posts that were basically press releases it seemed a good point to outline a bit better what we’d like to see in contributions to the site.

The old posting guidelines on Mumubl.com were in the terms and conditions mostly covered a more legal type angle. There is now a posting guidelines page that gives you more of an idea of what is preferred from a content curation view point.

Whilst it leads with the title “a stories site, not a reviews site” it doesn’t mean reviews aren’t welcome, they are in a way stories in themselves. They just aren’t the focus of the site, don’t expect to see any star ratings added to the site for example.