Physical media is officially back
“Those movies and TV shows that you're watching on Netflix and Amazon, they're going to disappear,” Allison NB says.
Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.
Consider the seed for an “Embedded zine” planted…—Kate
Today’s ICYMI is a conversation with the incredible
of . What started as a chat about memes as a coping mechanism for 2025 turned into an academic and structural exploration of memes as language. I love to get nerdy about “silly” things!One of my favorite Christmas-y movies—one of my favorite movies in general, really—is the British 2000s classic About A Boy. Hugh Grant’s bachelor pad was sleek and expensive and filled with, at the time, the most modern electronic gadgets available. As I watched the movie again this past December, I realized that not only were those fancy CD and DVD players now retro, but that I could also probably get them for much, much cheaper than they originally cost.
Well, maybe not cheaper. But given recent events, I’ve been feeling pretty iffy about my reliance on big tech companies. I’m starting to think inventors really popped off when they came up with “things we can hold in our hands.” I used to have a DVD collection and an entire book of CDs that I let slip away over time. Now I’m slowly starting to rebuild my physical media collection—and seeing many others do the same.
I first came across
on Substack Notes. Allison—who also has over 28,000 followers on Instagram, where she shows off her impressive collection of physical media—launched her newsletter to “go deeper” into her love of music, movies, and books. “I was a part of the Tumblr generation,” she tells me, and her vinyl records, zines, games, DVDs, and more are a testament to the patient and passionate curation she originally cultivated online. If I needed a sign to finally start building my own media library, Allison’s posts were it.In this conversation, we talk about how her love of physical media started, where she sources her collection, and why it’s becoming so important to own our own entertainment.
When did your love of physical media start?
I owe a lot of the love of physical media and the tangible to my mom and my partner. My mom, because growing up she collected a lot of art books and we had books and National Geographic magazines and cassettes all over the house. And I think growing up around that was very influential. I ended up taking a lot of that into my own home. But when my partner and I started dating in 2020, he really helped me dive more into that world. We run a Risograph press and he's very involved with the zine and print community.
When you're a dual income, no kid household, you spend your money on books and movies and things that you really enjoy. I think also the pandemic had a huge impact on us wanting to just buy movies or books. When you're stuck inside, you either buy movies or you pay like a hundred dollars a month for various streaming platforms, and physical media is true ownership.
What are the main types of media that you collect?
So for myself, definitely vinyl. I work in the music industry and I love music. I like the sound of vinyl. I like the act of putting a record on and sitting with it in the room and not having to skip around songs on a streaming platform. More so on my partner's side, it's definitely zines. We go to a lot of zine fairs and we either do a lot of trades or purchasing from our friends..
The one I'm most jealous of is the Wallace and Gromit VHS collection.
Yeah, those are from childhood. Maybe this is TMI, but my parents ended up splitting and with that, a ton of your stuff ends up getting sent to Goodwill or whatever. And I managed to grab the Wallace and Gromit and my old GameCube games. I'm so glad I did before they all went away.
Oh my gosh. That makes me emotional. You kind of touched on this, but why do you prefer analog entertainment over streaming and digital?
Like I said before, physical media is true ownership, and there are so many different streaming platforms and music services and people are buying their books digitally now. And the fact is that that's all licenses. Those movies and TV shows that you're watching on Netflix and Amazon, they're going to disappear after a certain point in time. And when you purchase a movie or a TV show that you really love and that you will find yourself revisiting in the future, you know that that'll be around. There's a movie, I think it's 28 Days Later—
Oh I've heard about this. It's like totally inaccessible.
Yeah, totally inaccessible. I hope I'm not butchering this, but they basically couldn't come to an agreement on who would distribute it, and it's impossible to find. You kind of have to find bootlegs and now there's scalpers and stuff selling it for over a hundred dollars online. [Turns out that Sony finally released the film to rent or buy digitally in December!]
If I really enjoy an album or a movie or a book, the best way to support that creator or that musician or that director is by just buying a physical copy. I don't know off the top of my head how much more they end up making through a DVD purchase versus Netflix, but it's something you can revisit in the future and you have it.
Physical media is also home decor, in a way. One of the first things I think of when I see pictures of your space is not necessarily "Wow, they have so many pieces of content to consume." It's like, "That home looks amazing."
Thank you. I'm glad you mentioned that 'cause we were in a very minimalist-centered trend with home decor, and there's nothing wrong with that, but I think the physical media that you collect can be arranged in a way where it is very appealing and it fits into your space. And not only that, but when you have friends over, it sparks conversation. I often will find them gravitating towards our bookshelf or our zine wall. It's nice having something physical like that where you can flip through it together or hand your friend something and be like, "Hey, I think you'd really like this." Especially with the zines, there's a lot of smaller artists that we collect from and it's nice exchanging information and telling your friends about them because that's how information should get dispersed. It's just a nice community-builder and conversation piece as well.
With the advent of streaming for music and DVDs, a whole part of someone's personality is not visible, and so you don't learn as much about them when you're at their house. You would need to, I guess, scroll through what they've watched on Netflix, which just feels weird.
And there's also the trading aspect, too. I've borrowed books to friends or like borrowed zines to friends or games. Like, we have a huge game closet. That's something you can't do with Netflix. I mean, you can share passwords and stuff. But there's just something more gentle about handing somebody a physical copy and being like, "Hey, just return it when you're done and we can talk about it."
Netflix is cracking down on sharing passwords, too. You can't share in the same way. You have to all be individuals paying the company.
And another thing I was thinking of too, and maybe I'm getting too paranoid about the state of the world right now, but you see book bans, right? Books are getting banned from libraries, and I understand the appeal of Kindle. I have one myself. I buy longer books on it. But there could be a potential where books start getting banned or taken down from Kindle or even movies from streaming platforms. That's why physical media is so important and ensures that we have access to those things that maybe our leaders don't want us to indulge in.
When I started this journey, I immediately went on Reddit and I was like, "best Blu-ray player." And I got really deep into threads from people who know so much more about this than me saying like, "this is the best one and here's why." How much into that side of things are you?
Honestly, that's all my partner. And honestly, we just stream our Blu-rays through our PlayStation.
That's actually funny, 'cause I wanted the fancy Blu-ray player and my husband wanted a PlayStation. I finally relented and said, okay, we can do the PlayStation. And so he's gonna feel very validated by this. Where do you go about finding the physical media itself?
When my partner and I travel, we always look for local bookstores and record stores and comic stores, too. I get a lot of our vinyl when we travel as souvenirs. My friend in town, too, owns a record store, so I often find myself going in there and picking something up. There's this event called the New York Art Book Fair that we've been to for the last two years, and when we go we save up and we just absolutely splurge. Or if we’re tabling ourselves, we'll often trade a zine that we've made for someone else's zine.
A lot of the stuff we have collected comes from our travels and seeking out local bookstores and vinyl and it kind of acts as a memory, too, of those trips. Going to thrift stores or antique stores, there's a lot of really cool vinyl and books and movies that you can find there too if you're on more of a budget, and there's something really precious about that too, like finding that perfect little treasure.
There's a library that's been under construction next to our apartment for literal years and I think it seems close to opening and I hope they'll still have DVDs to check out there because that would be an amazing way to do it too. That's the IRL version of seeing what's on Netflix. We can just walk over to the library and pick something out.
I live in Dallas and it is not a walkable city at all, but we're fortunate enough to have a neighborhood library right there. It's great getting to walk over there and not have to spend money. The libraries are like our last third space, really.
A recent post of yours on Notes was about Spotify and how do we move away from that and how do we move away from bad streaming services. Where are you on that journey? Did you get any good feedback?
This is long overdue, but with the election, I'm just so sick of giving my money to companies that are using it for bad. Why am I giving my money to Spotify? Or why am I giving my attention to Meta? These companies don't deserve it. And I feel like I'm in a phase where I'm going through a deep spring cleaning and trying to give up my own comfort and convenience to be a more ethical consumer.
With Spotify, I had been wanting to get off of it for a long time. I'm like a super user. I'm on it constantly. And I knew about how little Spotify paid its creators and that was a problem for me and just seeing that Spotify donated money to Trump and hosted his inauguration brunch and are introducing more AI artists onto the platform, I was like, I've reached the tipping point. On Instagram, I posted about me leaving Spotify for Tidal, and that story absolutely blew up. It gave me a lot of hope knowing that people were feeling the same. I think that more people are wanting to take control of who they're giving their money to, especially on a subscription basis. It's been two weeks since I've been off of Spotify and I'm still getting used to the Tidal interface, but I chose Tidal because they pay artists like four times more than Spotify does and AI isn't flooding their platform, and I'm looking to do similar things. I think it's easy to feel really helpless 'cause we're in an oligarchy in a sense, but as an individual, you can make moves to feel good about what you're doing and it all starts on an individual basis.
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What I’m consuming…
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