I am fully aware that physical media is on the decline and has been for more than a decade now. Yet I remain a big consumer of it. I still buy books, magazines, CDs, Blu-rays and the occasional DVD. But several factors in my life, recent government legislation, the fluctuating currency market and the tightening market for physical media have made me rethink how I consume entertainment.
The major factor is the recent tax legislation on overseas good and the unintended effects that had. Rewinding back to 2010, you may recall Gerry Harvey, billionaire owner of national furniture and whitegoods chain Harvey Norman, lobbing to have the GST threshold on goods imported by consumers themselves into this country from $1000 to nil. In other words if you bought something online from overseas regardless of the cost, you’d be paying 10% GST. The main argument behind this is that as overseas retailers don’t pay the GST, they have an unfair advantage over local retailers, which is a pretty stupid claim to make. Of course they don’t pay GST as they aren’t in Australia. Unsurprisingly the proposed new tax did not go over well with consumers with Harvey stating he received online abuse (aka criticism);
“Because of my profile, I then get all these threats and people hone in on me. It becomes me, Gerry Harvey and Solomon Lew - billionaires, greedy, ugly, old, out-of-date cunts, and the people writing this seem to think we have been ripping them off for years and that we deserve this.”
That statement is pretty amusing as he inadvertently hits the nail on the head; consumers are being ripped off by local retailers and they knew it and took their business elsewhere. He doesn’t get it, and it was even more clearer with this baffling example he gave;
“What we are talking about is someone buying a guitar in New York, for instance, and having it sent over here 30 per cent cheaper. It is giving that overseas retailer the advantage”.
As people rightly pointed out, even factoring in shipping, it would still be far cheaper to import the guitar with 10% GST on it than it would to buy locally. Due to the rising Australian dollar, which reached above parity with US dollar at one point, forcing consumers to pay the GST didn’t create “a level playing field” for Australian retailers. Regardless, after years of lobbying from the business council and businessmen like Harvey, legislation was eventually brought in; The Treasury Laws Amendment (GST Low Value goods) Act 2017, which took effect on 1 July 2018. Essentially it meant that any overseas business that sold goods to Australians and earned a gross of AU$75,000 per annum had to collect and pay tax to the Australian Taxation Office (ATO).
So what the federal government was doing was getting retailers from overseas to collect tax Australian consumers from their purchases and then forward it on the ATO. No, I shit you not. In the UK where consumers pay Value Added Tax (VAT) on overseas purchases, the tax is calculated by customs and paid at the post office, much like here in Australia with goods valued over $AU1,000 (or $AU500 if you are getting stuff delivered via a courier). This method would be the most normal, consistent way to collect the tax one would have thought. Asking overseas retailers to do your dirty work seems absurd and you’d think most companies would tell a foreign government to fuck right off.
However 1 July 2018 rolled around and I was utterly surprised that some of the smaller companies actually complied the government’s demands, in particular CD Japan and AmiAmi. However I soon noticed that companies like the Right Stuf and all of the UK retailers I used did not add on GST. I thought I might be charged GST at the post office for these orders, but was not. The other thing I noticed as I passed through customs at Mascot airport earlier this month after returning from Japan, is that customs did not charge me GST there either. So with this non-compliance or ignorance of the law (and why should overseas companies comply anyway?) the new law is being applied inconsistently. Despite Gerry Harvey’s instance, it has created an even more uneven playing field.
Not only that, Amazon refused to collect the tax ad publicly and humiliatingly berated the federal government by threatening to block Australian customers from buying products from their overseas sites. The government didn’t fold and on 1 July 2018 Australian citizens could no longer order products from any of their international sites. The Australian site was of course not effected, however tens of thousands of products available on other Amazon sites weren’t available on the Australian site. When they were they could absurdly cost hundreds of dollars more. Frustratingly I later discovered that Amazon was collecting consumption tax for other countries where non US citizens, especially on the US site. In particular for European countries. It’s odd. Why is Amazon forgoing profit when they could easily comply? It seems so pigheaded.
You could potentially buy stuff from the UK and US sites, but would need a proxy shipper (forwarding service) to send the items on to Australia. But this of course requires additional fees and most of these forwarding services now charge and collect the GST for the government. In terms of collecting Japanese books, CDs and blu-rays, Amazon’s middle finger to Australian customers has put a large obstacle in the way. I could use a forwarding service, which can be quite expensive, or CD Japan, which has no discounts unlike Amazon Japan, far less products and charges the GST. As a result I actually pay 2% more consumer tax using CD Japan than Japanese citizens do for the same product (Japanese consumer tax is 8%).
This whole process of the government incompetently requiring consumers to pay GST on overseas products not only forces consumers to pay more for the same product, it essentially cuts off an entire country’s population from accessing hundreds of thousands of products, most of which cannot be purchased within Australia. It’s anti-competitive and anti-consumer.
The other big factor is the ever decreasing value of the Australian dollar. It has dropped almost 10 cents against the US dollar since the beginning of the year, and is at it’s lowest level in 18 months. The Australian dollar has also sunk slightly against the yen and British pound. I did buy discs when the dollar sunk to 47.75 cents in 2001. But taking into consideration rising utility bills and other items taking a bite into my paypacket, the increase in buying overseas discs is reasonably steep. I suspect the dollar will fall more over the next year putting more pressure on my buying habits.
As I stated in the opening sentence, physical media is on a downward trend. I noticed this on my last trip to Japan that few shops outside the big electronics retailers (Yodobashi Camera, Bic Camera etc.) and the two main record chains, Tower Records and HMV, selling CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray discs. I was also baffled at the lack of illustration collection books (i.e. anime artbooks) in the usual shops. K-Books seemed to have given up and so did a large more mainstream book chain. Animate, Gamers and Kinokuniya still stocked them. Second hand anime discs seem to be virtually worthless, especially top tier titles. I managed to pick up the entire run (7 individual discs) of the second season of “Love Live! Sunshine!!” for a single note; ¥10,000. Most volumes retail for ¥7,000 each brand new (the first volume is a fraction cheaper). The set of seven discs I bought were virtually mint. I had also bought the entire series of “Macross Delta” for about a third of its full retail price in a second store in Osaka around 18 months prior.
In the west, the health of the physical video market seems really mixed. While limited run niche titles seem to do well (see what Discotek and All the Anime are doing), paradoxically the more popular titles seem to be selling less. Several high profile titles do not have releases or have incomplete releases outside of Japan; “Devilman Crybaby”, “Little Witch Academia” and “Sound! Euphonium” to name a few. I would suspect that due to the ubiquity of streaming that these titles will never receive western releases, and that the fans will mostly not care if they do. Those that do receive releases are sometimes quite substandard in terms of quality to price ratio, both in terms of video and packaging (Funimation, Aniplex USA and Pony Canyon US are often the worst offenders).
Lastly, I am literally running out of space to store stuff. I have been collecting anime related stuff for close to a quarter of century. Despite several culls, the house is packed to gills with books, magazines, video tapes, laserdiscs, DVDs and Blu-rays. It’s just about reached a critical point where my collection will go from looking organised and (mostly) out of sight to verging on looking like the house of a problem hoarder.
With the added expense, the additional hoops to jump through, the low quality/high price of some products or the fact they don’t exist at all in a physical format and the lack of space, I’m just about done with collecting. However it’s not a choice I want to make. I really don’t like not having a physical copy of shows I really like. There is no guarantee at all that your favourite TV show, movie, song or album will be available legitimately on a streaming service (and bootleggers sometimes don't take up the slack). Licences eventually run out. Sometimes they aren’t renewed. Sometimes companies don’t want to renew licenses or even licence the product in the first place. Companies decide that certain things are profitable anymore or even go bankrupt and vanish. With no physical copies, shows could easily vanish from the web, forgotten forever. While that may seem rather hyperbolic, I think it’s a reasonably plausible future.
But I suspect within a year push will come to shove and I’ll just have to give up on buying discs. I have practically stopped purchasing books, doujinshi and movie programmes as there just is no room to store them anywhere. Whether I like it or not, streaming is here to stay. Sure I’ll probably save a fair amount of money by not buying this stuff, but I think I will take a bit of time adjusting to the fact I can’t buy a copy of a new movie or TV series I like. It’s a real end of an era for me.
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