Not so long ago, shelves around everyone’s houses were booming with CDs and DVDs. Treasured movies and music were kept and protected, and everyone in the house helped choose the movie of the night under the bright lights of their local Blockbuster. The shared sentiment was that media was special. You connected with a specific movie or song and you supported artists directly by buying their work. But that way of approaching the media and culture scene is long gone.

Today, the world is filled with unlimited possibilities. Want to watch an obscure French movie? Stream it. Want to listen to a new album? See if it is streaming. Love something an artist made? Pay a subscription to access it. Anything and everything you could ever want to watch or listen to is available on the internet, so instead of getting that one CD, you can get every song under the sun for a similar price. 

Streaming brought with it a new relationship with artistic mediums, and its effect on our culture has been palpable. Most people, myself included, have not used physical media in ages, and the discs we used to cherish are either collecting dust or have been thrown out. While I understand the appeal of what these services promise, I am not completely sure it has been for the better

As a self-identified repeater who has listened to the same 10 albums for five years, why do I not own my music? The answer is simple: if I switch from digital to physical, I am missing out on all the possibilities—and in a world in which efficiency is king, that does not seem enticing.

“I cannot help but think that I have been brainwashed out of ownership, and the way back to it seems too complicated to undertake.”

While I was once in awe of the amount of things I could listen to, the investment seems less and less worth it. I no longer connect with my music the same way I used to because I always know there is more. There are more shows to watch, more movies to see and more music than my ears could ever listen to. The problem is, this abundance has diluted my appreciation. When you own music, you form a genuine connection with it. You listen to full albums and gain a deeper perception of the artist and their body of work. Material that you love is more exciting because it is yours. You make your own curation instead of letting an algorithm decide what you should consume next. But switching out of this cycle is hard.

Streaming still makes sense in certain situations. You are not going to buy a movie you have never watched or music you do not really like. But maybe we could start thinking of streaming and owning as supplementing each other instead of choosing one or the other. We could own what we really love so that we are not at the whim of each streaming platform when it inevitably moves our favourite show to another service. In doing so, we can reframe our relationship with media from merely consuming it to actually forming a genuine connection with it.