It's a regrettable fact that the streamers of sound and vision are now in a position to compel the customer to rent content, not own it.
For those who are happy to have all and every new release playing on their devices in an endless, rolling stream, maybe this is acceptable. Who wants to own something that is of no interest a few days later?
But there is a core of content which maintains its artistic value over decades and continues to maintain its listener/watcher base as new people encounter and discover the music and the films [and the old ones die off ...]
One might say that the entire catalogue of 'classical' music is unquestionably a large part of this. A great deal of the jazz catalogue also forms a part of this core content.
It is a well known fact of 'record shop' life, in the jazz section, that there are always several copies of 'Kind Of Blue' behind the counter for those customers who say "My grandson has become intereseted in jazz. What should I buy him?" Will there come a day when a physical copy of KoB is no longer available? That would be iniquitous.
When I sold a flat in London for a tidy profit I sat down with the Penguin Guide to Classical Music and the same .....Guide to Jazz, went thru' both volumes, composer by composer, musician by musician and complied a library of both genres.
I then spent several days at the two megastores on London's Oxford St, Virgin and HMV, buying this library of CDs. There are holes in both sets. I have only recently become really aware of the supreme talent of the band 'Return to Forever' and of Chick Corea and Stanley Clarke in paticular. The same goes for Larry Carlton and Lee Ritenour.
These artists have catalogues going back decades. The likelihood of having access to them on a streaming service is as likely as having access on Netflix to films by directors such as Kurasawa, Michael Powell, Pedro Almodovar and many other 'art cinema' directors. I know because I took out a Netflix trial sub, went looking for the films of these directors and found not one by any of them. This was confirmed by a search by the Netflix sales agent I had to call to cancel my sub.
I realise that a core of the rock catalogue is available on Spotify, for example, when I go to a friend's house and he shows off his "Alexa, play 'Blabber and Smoke' by Captain Beefheart." trick.
But the core extends far wider than the best of rock since 1965. There must be some provision for a physical copy of it. You will recall that the debate among the record companies about the maximum amount of content on a CD was settled by the boss of Sony, who declared "Beethoven's 9th Symphony, on one side."
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