Note: I had published this on Sunday the 8th but it apparently did not go through. I am dating it as such.

We’ve got a suffering economy that’s impacting the anime industry and its viewers in a number of ways. People have less disposable income. Anime dvd sales have been declining on top of fewer people buying dvds in general. Some internet providers are limiting bandwidth while others have plans to do so in the near future. This affects not only torrent downloads but also streaming sites such as Crunchyroll and Youtube, especially as the quality of  video streaming gets better and better. This even affects simple file transfers over instant messenger programs. This can force anime fans to explore other methods of exchanging anime, such as good ol’ “actually walking up to someone and giving it to them.” Be it downloaded anime stored on an external hard drive or usb drive, or purchased legitimate dvds or even high-quality streamed episodes, people will have a reason to gather in order to minimize bandwidth and money usage.

At this point, you wouldn’t really call these gatherings “anime clubs,” as it’d just be a bunch of friends who already know each other, but isn’t that pretty much the way clubs start off? The major difference would be that while there might be a disparity in amount of anime possessed by a single person, it wouldn’t be the case where one person has all the power, especially when it comes to downloadable anime. Exchanging files (and let’s not forget you can officially download some shows now for a nominal fee so “files” is not inherently an illegal word) would be like trading tapes or having vcr parties, only much much faster. In time, maybe people will want to watch it together or talk about the shows they’re trading.

Nothing like necessity to force nerds who might normally curl into a ball to go out there and talk to people to get some more of that precious anime stuff. Not saying this is a guaranteed chain of events, but I feel like there’s a decent possibility this might happen.