Will physical media take us back to the future?
episodePreviously titled “Buy to own: the resurgence of physical media” — renamed by the publisher on Aug 2, 2026
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Have you ever searched for an old comfort show after a long day only to realize it's been moved to Prime Video or Peacock or whatever new streaming service you don't have and don't want to pay for? Or maybe you're on summer vacation trying to get the perfect photo of golden hour and that dreaded pop-up appears on your screen. You're running out of storage. You're not alone. From beloved shows being wiped completely off of platforms to buying storage for $1,000 smartphones, it feels like we're at the whim of the tech companies charging us $9.99 a month or more to get access to our things. But if I'm honest, I get the sense that we want more than just access. We want to own our things again. We stream songs and shows and films, but we used to just have CDs, box sets, and Blu-rays.
I, for instance, have taken up buying vinyls and DVDs to maintain a collection of the art I cherish most. We want access that can't suddenly be taken away. And this speaks to a larger trend of young people in particular driving physical media sales in an effort to confront their dependence on streaming services and build their own independent archives instead. But as AI, big tech and media platforms dominate more of our digital lives, I have to wonder, what does agency look like for media consumers like us? To answer that question, digital archivist Katie Kemp and culture writer at The Cut, Kat Zhang, joined the show to break down how our digital world is much more precarious than we realize and how physical media and buildable tech could empower us to envision a better future.
Kat, Katie, welcome to It's Been a Minute.
Thanks for having us. Thanks.
Hello, hello. I'm Brittany Luce, and you're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident.
I wonder like, was there a moment for either of you where you were like, okay, I'm, I'm done with this or like, I got to try things another way.
Why are listeners turning back to vinyls, DVDs, and CDs instead of streaming?
I can't sign up for another streaming service or I can't, can't like lose track of another one of my favorite movies. Or was there a moment that sort of made it click for you that you wanted to do things differently?
Yeah, when Donald Trump got reelected, so like the beginning of 2025, it became so clear how platforms were just completely destroying our ability to communicate or shaping discourse in a way that was really distressing. I felt like I could never see any protest footage and then affected people's sense of hope and willingness to fight the status quo, you know, the, the content just, just became so much worse and, uh, like AI companies and AI content started coming into fashion. Um, and so I feel like 2025 was the year that really people really vowed to start like logging off and reassessing their relationship to tech. Because we saw how the tech oligarchs had ingratiated themselves with Trump and what impact that was having on our democracy.
But also we were just feeling like overloaded by brain rot content and bad news headlines. And there is just no sense of rest whatsoever.
And what about you, Katie?
I don't know if I can point to like one specific moment, but I remember, you know, we get those emails from our subscription services that say, hi there, we're raising the price. We're raising it again. Well, now we have this tier, it's the lowest tier and you have to pay, but you'll have advertisements. And so that was kind of happening to me. I want to say probably starting around like 2023, 2024. And I got really frustrated and I just thought, wow, Why am I paying to watch ads, basically? Especially now, as we've seen in the last years, these companies have started shifting into policies that really are at odds with what a lot of us value and the way that they're selling our data and our information.
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