You Will Own Nothing if They Have Their Way

While much is often made of the ‘vinyl revival’, it must be noted that this is coming off a very low base. Vinyl sales, like CDs and cassettes, collapsed to almost nothing in the face of the streaming onslaught. Streaming still absolutely dominates: vinyl sales might have surged by 10 per cent in a year, but 10 per cent of bugger-all is still bugger-all. Vinyl sales in the US reached $1 billion last year – the revenue for Spotify alone is still 20 times as much.

Nonetheless, a billion is pretty impressive growth from the rock-bottom of less than $11 million in 1993. While vinyl has started to climb, other physical media, such as CDs and DVDs appear to be reaching rock-bottom.

But a vinyl-like resurgence may be just beginning.

While a small coterie of young enthusiasts have been quietly amassing DVD libraries, more and more young people may soon be jumping on the bandwagon. The turning-point will almost certainly be the unscrupulous behaviour of streaming services.

Gamers will almost certainly be the tipping-point.

Sony plans to wipe 551 movies and TV shows from the PlayStation Store libraries of customers who paid full price for them. The deletion is coming on September 1 and so far the company has said nothing about giving anyone their money back […]

Anyone who hit “buy” on one of them will open their library that morning and find a hole where it used to be.

Sony cites “content licensing agreements”, but the subtext is as plain as a big, black, ‘redacted’ box on a FOI request: you don’t own it, peasant. You merely rented a licence the suits can revoke at whim.

The games will be next. Grand Theft Auto VI arrives with no disc in the box, just a download code. You pay $80 for a cardboard sleeve and a digital leash. You cannot lend it, resell it, or install it offline.

This is the quick march toward the World Economic Forum’s dystopian wet dream: “You will own nothing and be happy.”

Physical media has always been the great equaliser. A DVD or vinyl record is yours. It cannot be deleted by a corporate algorithm in Silicon Valley or Tokyo, let alone a bureaucrat’s office in Brussels or Wellington. It survives blackouts, account bans, and licensing disputes.

“I want to watch a movie on a disc… that I own… in my house!” as Hank Hill might have growled.

The young enthusiasts quietly building DVD libraries are ahead of the curve. More will follow as the streaming giants reveal their true nature: landlords who can evict you from your own digital library without notice.

The cost may seem prohibitive at first glance, but it is a small price to pay for actual ownership in an age when everything is subscription serfdom.

While vinyl prices today might seem overpriced to us greybeards who paid $8–12 for a record in the ’80s, they have actually kept rough pace with inflation. And it’s a price worth paying for tangibility and permanence in a disposable world.

The same logic applies to Blu-rays and physical games. When Sony and others kill physical copies entirely, the backlash will be ferocious. Gamers already understand what readers learned the hard way: digital is convenient until it isn’t. Then it’s gone.

The streaming model was always built on sand. It relied on endless content libraries and low prices to hook users. Now libraries shrink, prices rise and ‘licensing agreements’ become the corporate version of the Memory Hole.

Physical media offers something revolutionary in 2026: control. Permanence.

The revival is not nostalgia. It is a rational response to corporate overreach. In an age when governments and tech giants collude to control what you see and hear, owning your own copy is a tiny revolution.

The suits can keep their cloud. I’ll take the disc I can hold in my hand: the one they cannot delete when the mood strikes.

A hot summer of buyer’s remorse is coming for the streaming addicts. The smart money is already on physical. The rest will learn the hard way that, when you don’t own it, you don’t really have it.