The Era of Non-Ownership: How Subscriptions are Hurting Consumers

I’m old enough to remember when video games and movies were tangible products you could purchase, trade, and resell. Music albums had artwork and lyric sheets you could examine while listening to your favorite artist.

In 2023, 83% of Americans polled indicated that they subscribed to at least one video-on-demand streaming service. That’s an increase of 10 percentage points over the past five years, and there is no indication of slowing.

As content consumers, we no longer own the entertainment we consume. We’re licensing the ability to view it only within the particular places the content owners agree to. You have to access that content from one of a pre-approved list of browsers, operating systems, and even devices.

Video Games

Let’s start by looking at one of the media types that have been hit the hardest by this shift—video games. I fondly remember going to the local Hastings store and buying games like Quake, 7th Guest, and Warcraft. These games came with stylish box art and inserts that added to the game's overall appeal.

Warcraft came with a book that had letters written by the game’s fictional characters to add lore to the player’s experience. Space Quest, perhaps one of my favorite all-time game series, came with printed magazines that brought you into the fictional world and gave you something to look through when you weren’t playing.

There was real artistry there, and all of that is gone now because finding games that aren’t exclusively distributed digitally is extremely rare. If you want a shot at even an empty game box, you often have to splurg on an collector’s edition and spend 2–3x the amount just for the privilege of holding something physical in your hand. You still don’t own it… the actual game remains digital only.

If you want to have a reasonable game budget, you need to subscribe to one of the many game services out there that give you access to the latest games in exchange for a monthly fee. That fee only gives you temporary access to those titles. If you stop paying, you stop playing.

Want to play with friends over the Internet on your PlayStation? You need to shell out for PlayStation Plus. Want to play classic Nintendo games? Better pay up for Nintendo Online. Xbox Game Pass will let you play the latest Xbox titles, but you must keep handing Microsoft money for that privilege.

Movies and Television Shows

Movies and television shows are where things get even weirder. Suppose you subscribe to a traditional cable package with extras like HBO/MAX and Showtime. In that case, you get to see and even record many of the shows you know and love, but many of these networks now have their own streaming services where exclusive shows and movies are available only to those who shell out an extra $5–20/month.

Even then, you don’t own them. You’re just renting the streams to watch them on temporarily. Want to see any of the new Star Trek shows without waiting for them to one day eventually be syndicated to network TV? You’d better subscribe to Paramount+.

Want to see the new Star Wars shows? You’d better pay for Disney+.

Gone are the days when you could pay for one service and see almost everything.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. You can still buy Blu-rays and DVDs at the store. Well, not for long. Stores like Best Buy have moved away from selling disc-based media in recent years. While you can still purchase them in some retailers, the gradual reduction signifies things to come.

Music

Music has been surprisingly resilient. While cassettes and CDs are pretty much dead, vinyl records are back in a big way. A whopping 43.2 million vinyl records were sold in the United States in 2023. That’s an impressive number for a platform that was all but dead just a handful of years ago.

Unfortunately, it’s nowhere near where it once was. LPs account for 40% of the physical albums sold last year. That’s only 5% of the actual albums “sold” if you include digital sales.

Those digital sales? You guessed it… you don’t own those. Apple Music Store licenses the ability to download and listen to the music and it can revoke that license. Same goes for the subscription services such as Spotify, Pandora, Amazon Prime Music, etc.

Gone are the days when your music collection was really yours, save for the audiophiles that have a lingering attachment to the type of sound quality you can only get from physical media.

Conclusion

It’s a crying shame that we’ve come to a place where we stopped owning our copies of media in favor of the convenience of subscribing to it. Yes, you save some money on the front end by paying a monthly fee to access more music/movies/tv shows, but you lose out on that tangible experience that can only come with holding something in your hands.

For those of us that wax nostalgic about what was, at least we still have our collection to look back on.