NEW YORK - APRIL 1: A sample page of a Columbia Record and Tape Club (also known as Columbia House Record Club) advertisement as appeared in the April 1, 1978 issue of TV Guide magazine. The ad features the pitch: Any 7 records or tapes 1 cent, plus shipping handling. Music offered in the following formats: 12 inch vinyl stereo records, 8 track cartridge tapes, cassette tapes, and reel-to-reel tapes. (Photo by CBS via Getty Images)

CBS via Getty Images

In mid-August, reports circulated that Columbia House, the mail-order music club that taught generations how much fine print could hide behind “12 CDs for a penny,” was finally closing. After 71 years of dubious accounts and unpaid shipping and handling, a message appeared on its website saying the company would stop taking new orders on September 15. The message has since disappeared, and Columbia House has not replied to my repeated email inquiries. But its apparent demise has sparked nostalgic coverage of a time when you could hold on to the music you loved.

At its 1996 peak, Columbia House claimed 16 million members. How many of them were like my friend and his three brothers who opened at least 10 accounts from the same home address with first names from The Blues Brothers (Jake, Elwood, Cab, Aretha…) we’ll never know. Nonetheless, the club continued selling music until the late 2000s. After a 2015 bankruptcy, it survived another decade hawking DVDs through Edge Line Ventures LLC, which operates the brand under license.

These days the music Columbia House shipped can be summoned on Spotify faster than I can locate and open the Memorex cases. But those discs were mine. Columbia House could send me bills and charge me late fees, but once a CD arrived, the company could not make it vanish. I could play it, lend it, sell it, scratch it, copy songs onto a mixtape or gift the whole collection to my cringing children.

That increasingly quaint bundle of rights is what streaming has disrupted. Media have never been easier to carry and never been harder to keep.

The Impermanent Library

Consider Netflix. When the company introduced “Watch Now” in January 2007, its mail service offered more than 70,000 DVD titles. Its new streaming feature had about 1,000 movies and television programs. Streaming was initially an add-on to the physical business, not its replacement.

That changed quickly. A 2008 deal with Starz added roughly 2,500 titles at a time when Netflix had more than 12,000 streaming choices, compared with about 100,000 DVDs. Television became central to its strategy, though binge-watching shows was still a niche hobby of super fans. The silver screen was high art and cost more, while the small screen was yet to shake its “Vast Wasteland” 20th century identity. Netflix recognized TV’s reputation was in flux, and it seized the moment to acquire the rights to seasons of remaindered programs from studios. By the fourth quarter of 2011, television accounted for over 60% of the more than 2 billion hours Netflix subscribers streamed.

While prestige content during television’s Platinum Age is often credited for making mass consumption of shows a form of cultural expression, streaming services solved two major problems of binge-watching physical media: access and space. Through OTT platforms, the video store came to us and never sold out. Then it followed us onto laptops, phones, even outdoor televisions. Advances in devices and broadband speeds helped usher in Peak TV, an era when the explosion of available programming made it seem we could watch whatever, wherever, whenever.

But that infinite library was more abridged and impermanent than people realized at first.

On September 1, millions of U.S. Netflix subscribers will lose access to dozens of licensed films, including the original Rocky movies, the Creed trilogy, The Big Lebowski, The Breakfast Club, Schindler’s List, and Little Miss Sunshine.

Fans who want to access them in the U.S. (VPNs notwithstanding) will have to do so through other streaming platforms. That accessibility shift speaks to the fleeting nature of cultural consumption today, in which it can increasingly feel like nothing is owned, only experienced as permitted by inscrutable algorithms and user agreements.

When “Buy” Means “License”

The evolution of ownership this century has been subtle, with convenience spinning an illusion of progress while eliding consequences. In 2009, Amazon deleted purchased copies of George Orwell’s 1984 from customers’ Kindles. A publishing rights dispute had voided Amazon’s license to sell the ebook, and Amazon refunded those customers who had bought it. But the mass, remote erasure of literature sounds like something the Ministry of Truth would do.

That buy/rent distinction may be (slightly) clearer with Netflix. We pay for a subscription, and nobody reasonably expects every title to remain there forever, though we often forget that. It becomes murkier when a digital storefront presents a button marked “Buy,” especially when it also presents a cheaper button marked “Rent.”

California has begun treating those words as a consumer-protection problem. A law that took effect in 2025 generally bars sellers of revocable digital goods from using terms such as “buy” or “purchase” without clearly telling customers that they are receiving a license and that access may be revoked if the seller loses the rights. Subscription services are exempt.

Amazon is now fighting litigation over this distinction. In one long-running proposed class action, customers allege that Amazon misrepresented digital videos as purchases when they were receiving licenses instead. Has anyone seriously curled up with popcorn on a Friday night and said, “Let’s buy this limited license!”? A federal judge allowed most of those claims to survive a 2024 motion to dismiss, and class-certification briefing continued this summer. A separate 2025 suit invokes California’s new law and similarly challenges Amazon’s use of “Buy” for Prime Video content. Amazon disputes the allegations.

The legal question is complicated. The cultural question, perhaps less so: What does it mean to buy something when possession depends upon somebody else continuing to host it, license it, and recognize your account?

Disposition of Gaming Remains

Video games make the question harder to ignore because a purchased object can become unusable altogether. Long gone are the days of NES cartridges. But in 2026, some of the physical “games” I buy for my kids’ Switch 2 feel at best ceremonial. These so-called “Game-Key Cards” are thumbnail-sized chips you insert in Nintendo’s portable console. They look like mini game carts but don’t contain full game data. The “keys” just unlock a download. You still need internet, space on the device (or pricey memory cards) to download, and plenty of patience. Once downloaded, the game can be played offline, but the physical card must remain inserted as proof that you possess the right to play it. The object you own is therefore not the game itself but a transferable credential for software it does not contain.

It’s not just Gen X parents who are frustrated by this ephemeral ownership. When Ubisoft shut down the servers for its racing game The Crew in 2024, players sued. They alleged they had been led to believe they were buying a game when they were instead receiving limited access to one. Ubisoft denies wrongdoing, but it has agreed to a proposed $2 million settlement that would compensate eligible buyers. A final approval hearing is scheduled for November 13.

The backlash spread beyond the United States. A European citizens’ initiative called “Stop Destroying Videogames” gathered 1,294,188 verified signatures, enough to force a formal European Commission response. In June, the Commission declined, for now, to propose a legal requirement that abandoned games remain playable. However, it plans to bring publishers and consumer groups together to develop “an industry code of conduct on managing video games’ ‘end of life’,” which sounds like some simulacral advanced directive for a terminal game’s delisting. Will there be e-death doulas?

“It’s a pretty crappy trend,” says Dr. Kacey Doran, an esports scholar at Rowan University. “The benefits do not outweigh the negative effects for players and creators.” Despite both parties’ investments in the games, she explained, they must accept their works can be altered or disappear if the corporate caretakers so choose.

Should Clouds Have Landlords?

Some 75 years ago, Canadian economic historian Harold Innis argued that the physical characteristics of media help organize societies. Certain media are biased toward space: light, portable, and easy to transmit across distance (papyrus). Others are biased toward time: heavy, durable, and capable of preserving knowledge across generations (stone tablet). As Innis put it, a medium’s characteristics influence how knowledge moves “over space and over time.” Marshall McLuhan, Innis’s pithier intellectual heir, compressed the idea into his famous maxim: “the medium is the message.”

Innis was concerned not only with communication biases, but how ownership and centralized authority challenge culture. Writing about modern communication monopolies in 1952, he warned of the “destruction of elements of permanence essential to cultural activity.” In 2026, movies vanish from streaming libraries and purchased videogames can become unplayable.

Innis's “destruction of permanence” has become a feature of our streaming media economy. Shifting licenses create a kind of platform obsolescence for fans of shows like The Office, Friends, and Mad Men, forcing them to follow those shows to new services while often keeping the subscription to the platform they left behind. And clicking ‘Buy’ on an entire series through Prime Video still gets you a license, not a box set.

Streaming may be the most radically space-biased cultural medium yet invented. A shelf of DVDs is cumbersome. It occupies linear feet, gathers dust and contributes to the general misery of moving. Yet those same inconveniences give the collection permanence. Leave a disc untouched for 30 years and, barring physical decay, it remains there and works provided you can find a functioning player.

A streaming library weighs nothing and travels nearly everywhere. Its persistence, however, depends on account fees, servers, passwords, DRM, corporate solvency, territorial rights and licensing contracts that are mostly outside the control or even knowledge of the consumer.

What Disappears with the Shelf

The loss is larger than your favorite movies vanishing from Netflix. Physical ownership created a second life for media. Books could be resold. Records could be traded. DVDs could be loaned. The first-sale doctrine generally allows the owner of a lawful physical copy to dispose of that particular copy without the copyright holder’s permission. That principle has not transferred neatly to digital files: courts have held that transmitting a digital file can create a new copy rather than merely transferring the original.

That weakens not only resale, but the ordinary social life of media. Mixtapes, record swaps, CDs borrowed from friends, hand-me-down games, and used bookstores all depended on owners being able to do things with copies after the original transaction.

Possession created rituals as well as rights. “I waited in line to buy the final Harry Potter book,” Doran told me nostalgically, “and it was great! I doubt my nephew will experience that.” Gone too is the joy of opening the tightly packed box of your first 12 Columbia House CDs.

Streaming also moves preservation upstream. An out-of-print book can survive because people possess copies. A server-dependent game can disappear because one company turns something off. When access is centralized, corporate licensing decisions also help determine what remains readily available to cultural memory.

Inheritance changes too. Apple’s Legacy Contact system can give heirs access to photos, messages, notes and files stored in an account. Apple explicitly excludes movies, music, books and subscriptions purchased through that account.

Even here, though, impermanence is not inherent to digital technology. Apple advises users to download purchased content because titles can later become unavailable for redownload if Apple loses distribution rights. Microsoft stopped selling new movies and television programs in 2025 but says existing customers can still play their purchases and, on Windows, downloaded copies.

The distinction matters. An MP3 stored on a hard drive can be durable. The impermanence of streaming is not simply digital. It is architectural and economic, and a consequence of designing culture around continuing access rather than possession.

You Can’t Take It with You

Of course, ownership was never really permanent. CDs scratch. Hard drives fail. Houses burn. Even stone tablets fade or break (see Mel Brooks’s 15 Commandments). And who wants to take a wall of VHS tapes into eternity like some Comic Book Guy Pharaoh? There are profound benefits to digital distribution, most notably the elimination of inventory scarcity. A digital copy of GTA VI cannot sell out when it arrives November 19.

Still, physical media gives consumers something streaming often does not: control over the fate of a particular copy. The great bargain of the streaming era has been to exchange much of that control for unprecedented convenience. We surrendered permanence over time for portability through space.

If reports of its death prove accurate, Columbia House makes a fitting tombstone for that bargain. The company that once filled mailboxes with past-due notices will disappear, while millions of the objects it mailed remain on shelves, in basements, or ripped to audio files. The business proved less permanent than its products.

Somewhere in my Columbia House-bolstered collection is Guns N’ Roses Use Your Illusion I. I could still pull it from the dusty Case Logic binder that resides, last I moved, in an unmarked attic box, without checking whether Geffen Records has renewed a licensing agreement. As Axl Rose crooned on that album, “Nothin’ lasts forever, even cold November rain.”