“You’ll own nothing and be happy.”

This phrase, which originated by Danish politician Ida Auken in 2016, became the chilling prophecy of a reality that came upon us when we weren’t looking. The pivot from physical media to the digital age generated all sorts of excitement in the early 2000s, so it wasn’t hard to pivot yet again from digital ownership to subscription-based streaming.

Netflix first launched its streaming service in 2007, with Spotify coming along a year later. Both of these kicked off a massively popular trend toward streaming — featuring movies and music, respectively — and were embraced by the public for convenience and one low price.

But the utopia of media access quickly became a dystopia. Everyone wanted to get into the streaming business, and that fractured the one-site-for-all convenience of Netflix. Streaming (including music and games) got more expensive, less convenient, and more spread out all over the place. In 2025, Variety reported that the average US household spent $69 a month for streaming services — including those that were supported by ads.

Listen, you probably stream something, and I’m not here to tell you that you’re a bad person for doing so. I get why people do it. I see the convenience. But I also see the mounting frustration over rising costs, scattered media, unsearchable menus, insane algorithms, and declining quality. People may use streaming, but I rarely bump into anyone happy about it. It’s not a joy. It’s a burden.

It gets worse, because streaming services show that they do not have the user’s best interests at heart. They have all the control, and we have nothing. So companies can remove films, censor or outright delete “objectionable” TV episodes, insert different recordings of songs, and force us to continue to pay to keep access to stuff that we thought we were buying.

Just this past month, Sony announced that it was going to stop making physical discs for its PlayStation in a year or so — oh, and it deleted over 500 movies that users purchased through its store. For some, this was the wake-up call of their lack of personal control.

In short, we own nothing and we’re unhappy about it. That’s what I want to talk about, because there’s something happening that all of the studios and game companies and recording labels didn’t anticipate. They thought they had successfully corralled all of us docile sheep into pens for the full control, but now the sheep are waking up. We’re kicking and busting out. And we’ve found a way forward… by going back to the past.

There’s a real guerrilla war happening in the consumer landscape as people are rejecting streaming in favor of physical media. What’s wild here is that the biggest proponents of this aren’t us older Gen X and millennials (although we’re among them) but the younger Gen Z crowd that grew up in the digital age and are now sick of it.

Tons of people are gobbling up physical media: VHS, DVDs, Blu-Rays, CDs, vinyl, cassettes, game cartridges, you name it. It’s not some sort of flash-in-the-pan fad; this has been happening at an increasing scale for the past decade. More and more, consumers are rejecting streaming and demanding that they own their entertainment.

It was almost too late for this revolution to take place. Cars had phased out CD players, most households ditched their DVD players and stereos, and all of that old media was thrown out or carted off to thrift stores. In 2015, everyone was predicting that the era of DVDs and CDs was finally over. Companies figured that they could start shoving whatever they wanted in your face, guiding you with the algorithms and making up “content” with AI, and we’d go along.

But then we started fighting back by going to those thrift stores and yard sales and eBay and Facebook Marketplace. People bought old game systems and stereos and TVs that still worked because they were built before forced obsolescence became a thing. The conversation around physical media — and here, I include hardware like iPods that handled media offline — grew louder and more pronounced. Vinyl sales trended up year-over-year for a decade straight. Average people opened up VHS rental stores in their neighborhoods. Little lending libraries encouraged reading physical books. Retro gaming took off like crazy. Stores grudgingly started stocking movies and music again after taking them out years prior.

I started re-collecting CDs back in 2023 just as this movement was really taking off. A lot of my friends thought I was a little loopy, going archaic in our present age. Yet I’d point out to them the benefits of a collection, such as the pristine sound quality of a CD, the actual ownership, the physicality of it, liner notes, the joy of owning a visible collection, the thrill of hunting through stores for good finds, and the encouragement it gave to listening through albums start to finish. That’s not even to mention how it turned out to be a great avenue for music discovery — and I wasn’t influenced by the algorithm!

I haven’t subscribed to a movie or music streaming service save for free trials here and there (or free sites like Tubi). Rather, I’ve basked in the freedom that comes with curating my own collection of digital and physical media and enjoying it when I want to without any ads or additional price tags. My iPods and stereo give me more music satisfaction than Spotify ever could. And when I want to turn to movies, I’ve been digitizing all my old DVDs (and some new ones!) and throwing them all on an iPad or a spare Plex hard drive for comfort viewings.

Again, if you like streaming, this isn’t to shame you or to crow about how one way is better than another. Streaming’s not going away, I know. But there is a counter-revolution in process, and it’s not the flight of some internet guy’s imagination. Just type “physical media” into news sites, YouTube, or Reddit and see the flood of articles and videos on the subject. Consumers are reclaiming this corner of their entertainment lifestyle, and some companies are responding positively to this demand by making new hardware, putting out more movies on discs (such as Vinegar Syndrome and Shout! Factory), and producing new digital audio players, stereos, turntables, and game emulators.

It’s going to be an interesting ride down the slope of the remaining 2020s in this regard, and hopefully we’ll end the decade with physical media taking more of a prominence than where it was going into it.

There’s another slogan that’s become a greater rallying cry in 2026: “Physical media matters.” Each piece of old tech and old media purchased and repurposed for modern entertainment is a blow against corps that would rather have you subscribe forever. May the revolution only grow.