A new report on the state of digital comics sales in Publishers Weekly repeats the 5-10% share that we've been hearing for a long time
We saw how other physical formats took huge hits. Big retailers used to have large selections of DVD, Bluray, and CD. There were also smaller retailers who specialized in these things. Now the big stores have very small selections, if any, and most of the small retailers are gone. Why have comics remained? I do not claim to be an expert. I'm just an interested fan. I want to suggest two factors: what happened before digital, and why digital was embraced more fully in some media, and less in others. The attitudes that consumers had towards these products, and the relationships they had with retailers, also play a big role, imo.
Find the nearest nostalgic gen-x-er and ask them about record shops. Be prepared for an earful.* Long story short, there was a time when theses stores were everywhere, and they were awesome. The movie Empire Records is not a realistic portrayal of actual record shops, but it's pretty close to what we imagined they were. It also pits a beloved local shop against a corporate giant. That part is closer to reality, except that the corporate giants had mostly won well before that movie was made.
The local stores, even the citywide and regional chains, had lost lots of ground to nationwide, mall-based chains by the late 1980s. Big box retailers definitely took their chunk, too. By the mid 1990s, places like Best Buy were using CDs as loss leaders. That means they'd lose money on the sale of a CD, on the theory that you'd associate their store with great deals and also buy your TV, vacuum cleaner, washing machine, PC, or whatever from them, and they'd make up the difference on those items. The record companies allowed this because those stores were buying in such large volume. (The front of a Best Buy used to have several aisles of CDs, thousands titles.) Dedicated music stores, even large chains, could not compete, since they didn't have all that other stuff to sell. The music store in the mall might have a few CDs priced at under ten dollars, but Best Buy had hundreds.
Music buyers had little to no allegiance to the music stores in the malls. They tended to be big corporate things. The more local chains did get some love, but it wasn't enough. Music, as opposed to comics, was a truly mass market. Most humans like music to some degree, and most bought at least a few albums in their lives. Casual consumers were a big part of the market, and casual consumers care way more about saving money than about supporting a local shop.** So when CDs were no longer useful as a loss leader for big box stores, they were simply dropped, with too few specialty stores remaining to pick up the slack.
The stores that you could have a good relationship with, where you could chat about music with people who worked there because they really loved music, were gone long before digital showed up. Maybe that old hippy who ran Booger's Records and Tapes talked way too much about Blue Oyster Cult, but he was also happy to order whatever weird shit you read about in a music magazine. And the kids who worked there knew about the stuff you were into. Mall Music Conglomerated just wanted you to buy something and get out, and the employees were too stressed out by the whole mall environment to share much of your enthusiasm.
Here's another important factor. Serious music fans, the kind who might have stuck with a physical medium for the love of it, hated the music industry. They all knew that record companies screwed musicians in their contracts. They also knew that CDs cost cents to manufacture, but sold for fifteen bucks and up. So when Napster came along, they knew that downloading music wasn't stealing from the artists they loved, because those artists got paid jack shit from record sales. A generation that loved to hate the Man got to stick it to the Man in a way that hurt the Man. The band only made money from concerts anyway, and it was easy to tell yourself you'd spend the extra money on going to more shows.
So when itunes came along, the music-buying public had no strong attachments to the places where they bought music, and the most dedicated among them actively hated record companies. The ones who did want to keep buying CDs had few options.
Comic books, however, were never profitable enough to interest Big Retail in a serious way. The money a store gets from a single comic book, compared to the amount of space it takes up on the sales floor, is very small compared to many, many other products. Big chains, from Wal-Mart to Sheetz, measure sales per square foot of display space. This is a huge part of why comics moved almost entirely to the direct market. Those old school displays (old as in, most people reading this have never seen one) in drug stores and convenience stores, the "newstand" market you see in pieces about comics history, were replaced by sunglasses, t-shirts, and all sorts of stuff that produced many more dollars per foot than comics. Big box stores have experimented with carrying comics now and then, but it never lasts long because the return per foot remains small.
The only kind of business that can make money selling comics is a business run by somebody who loves comics in a big way, and is willing to dedicate huge efforts into selling them. Even when your local comic shop sells a high-dollar back issue, they've invested more personal time in that back issue than anybody at the local Wal-Mart invested in their most expensive, 900 inch, mithril screen, 280k TV. The manager at Wal-Mart ain't got to grade that shit. This means that comic book stores have always been places that attract passionate retailers as well as passionate customers.
Comic shops were not dependent on casual consumers (because there generally weren't any). If a comic shop could make it in your town, it was because people nearby needed to buy comics. This meant that the local comic shops run by old hippies were never replaced by Mall Comics Conglomerate. They just turned into local comic shops run by old comic book fans. You could always go in there and talk about comics. The comics-buying public was very much attached to the stores where they bought comics. The comic shop guy, even the kind parodied in the Simpsons, was not the Man who ran the record companies. Comic shops were not impersonal corporate constructions like most music stores. They were our places, for us.
I'm going to assume anybody reading this is already aware of the fact that collecting is a bigger factor in comics than in music. A high proportion of comic book buyers are collectors. Even those of us who had large CD or tape collections were, in general, far less precious about them. We played them all the time, kept them in the car, etc.
When digital comics came along, there was simply less reason to switch. The physical product had not been devalued as a loss leader. The dedicated specialty stores had not been wiped out. The most passionate buyers did not hate the industry that produced comics.*** These factors are in addition to the collectibility, which made the convenience of replacing a physical collection less attractive.
*If you have an uncle in this age bracket who has bad political takes, asking him about record stores at Thanksgiving might divert him onto a less offensive, but equally opinionated rant.
**Albums also have a unique disadvantage, in that many consumers might want only one or two songs, and so resent buying an entire album to get them.
***Not that the comics industry doesn't also have a history of cheating its talents, but it hasn't been perceived in the same way. Maybe because the scale is much smaller? IDK. Something to think about.
(Also, why have book stores remained? Barnes & Noble and Books-A-Million are still around with their large stores, and most cities have at least one small independent store. I don't have many guesses about this, but i thought i should acknowledge it. Tabletop RPGs also still sell as physical books.)
