I've gone back to physical media. Vinyl, CDs, Blu Rays and DVDs. I just buy what I like. I don't need a huge library, that actually gives me "choice paralysis" and I end up not watching/listening to anything.
I still use Internet based services, for example I might find a new band because someone on Instagram posted about them. Or maybe I listen to an album on streaming before deciding if I'm buying it. Oh and some live music venues have Youtube live streaming (e.g. Smalls jazz club). With movies, of course I might watch a movie trailer or a review on YouTube.
Speaking of movies, the situation is different because unlike music, I can't actually find most of my favourites on streaming services. However more often than not, you can rent them online, so I might rent (but never buy!) a movie through Apple, YouTube etc., then if I like it and think I want to watch it again, I will buy a Blu-ray. But I kinda gave up on pure streaming services such as Netflix etc. since their catalogue is so shallow.
This obviously doesn't work for everyone, if your way of listening to music is just "Hey Alexa play a smooth jazz playlist while I cook" then of course streaming is the right thing for you. Same if you just like to watch movies casually and you're not a film buff, in that case Netflix & co. are OK.
This. I had ripped a bunch of DVDs and had them on my NAS, sort of like NetFlix where the movies are all ones you like and they are never "leaving soon" :-).
Im seeing prices now around $10/TB for storage. Not fast, sure, but with 8 x 16TB disks, you get 128TB storage, and with RAID6 96TB. And thats only $1300
And if you architect the storage server right, you can use NFS on that and do all your exports to various docker containers and VMs. Proxmox makes setting this up pretty painless.
And if you have money to burn and want screaming fast, go with some of the NVME drives and combined cards. Then you can do this near-solid state and also reduce your form factor a LOT.
We're in the middle of basically every major "service company" enshittifying or already done so. Services are getting worse, costs are going up, and they're slow-boiling everyone to extract as much money from both customers and businesses. So, running this stuff yourself is the only way to retain your freedom and control.
My biggest recent shock: ATSC3, the over the air broadcast standard that enables 4K broadcasts, allows for DRM. OTA broadcasts now locked down and can't be easily recorded. Shocking.
Looks like as we got a lot of more media it became more ephemeral - social media posts that impossible to find, snapchat/insta stories, disappearing slack history. Some of this is feature, not a bug.
Personally I _never_ wanted to watch same movie twice, but I can understand some would. I guess most are still accessible in some archive somewhere for a small fee. I'd guess that fee is far less than you hoarding it for 4 decades.
My older cousin's son used to copy every DVD he would rent from video stores (remember DVD Shrink?), and stopped when he realized the great majority of them, he did not ever watch again. The ones that he did rewatch tended to be ones he wanted to buy anyway.
I think it all depends on your taste, certain types of movies are less about things like plot twists and more about other elements of movie making that make them more enjoyable to re-watch multiple times.
I used to watch hollywood, but after meeting my partner she introduced me to foreign film which I consume now exclusively. I do keep a list to recommend others, but never considered rewatching.
You can't even make a backup of the shows and movies you "buy", which just means "license", today.