Rented Forever

I'm a few songs into Counting Crows' Live at Town Hall when I decide I want more of this. Not just this concert but this kind of thing. The thing where a band you love stands on a stage somewhere and plays for two hours, and somebody had a camera, and the room was good, and now you can be in it whenever you want.

So I go looking. Across a Wire, the Counting Crows record that's half-VH1-Storytellers, half-MTV-Live-at-the-10-Spot. Skin and Bones, the Foo Fighters acoustic show from the Pantages in 2006. Pulse, Pink Floyd at Earls Court in '94. Three concert films I'd love to actually own.

That's where the trouble starts.

Here's the thing about owning a concert video in 2026: you mostly can't. You can rent one indefinitely from iTunes. You can rent one indefinitely from Amazon. You can subscribe to a service that has it this week and maybe not next week. What you cannot easily do, at least not through the front door, is buy a thing that you'll still have if Apple has a falling-out with the rights holder, or if Amazon's licensing deal expires, or if the company you bought it from goes out of business in 2031.

We've been quietly retrained on what the word "buy" means. The button still says it. The receipt still says it. The little library page in your account still says it. But the thing you're paying for is a licence to access a file someone else controls, on terms they can change, for as long as they decide to keep the lights on. That's not buying. That's renting forever and "forever" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

This isn't unique to concert videos. It's the same with films you've "bought" on a streaming service. The same with ebooks you've "bought" on Kindle. The same with music you "bought" from iTunes in 2008 that's now a DRM-wrapped file you can sort of use and sort of can't, depending on what device you're on and which moon phase Apple is in. We've moved, quietly and without a real conversation, from a world of ownership to a world of access — and a lot of us pressed the same button we always did and didn't notice the substitution.

To be fair: access is genuinely good for a lot of things. Streaming a film once on a Tuesday night is a fine thing. Discovering a record on Spotify is a fine thing. I'm not asking anyone to live in 1998. But there's a category of work — the records you love, the films you'd watch every few years for the rest of your life, the concert that meant something — where renting it forever is not the same as owning it. And the platforms have very gently encouraged us to forget that.

The answer, as far as I can tell, is the disc. The physical, ugly, takes-up-shelf-space disc. Blu-ray for the concerts, vinyl or CD for the music, paperbacks for the books that matter. Once it's pressed and in your house, nobody can revoke it. Nobody can pull it from your library at three in the morning because of a contract renegotiation. Nobody can decide your version is now the censored cut. It's yours.

(And yes — once it's in your house, people figure out their own ways of making it portable. I'll leave it at that. The point isn't the workaround; the point is that the disc is the only artifact in this entire chain that you actually possess.)

There's a small renaissance happening around physical media right now, and I think it's the right instinct. Not a nostalgia thing. Not a hipster thing. A we got tricked and we're noticing thing. The streaming era promised us infinite shelves and delivered us infinite landlords, and I think a lot of people are doing the math on what that actually costs over twenty years.

So I'm doing the math too. Across a Wire, Skin and Bones, Pulse. I'll find them, on disc, even if it takes a minute. They'll sit on a shelf next to Live at Town Hall, which is currently streaming somewhere I don't control, on a platform that doesn't owe me anything past tomorrow.

The concerts I love deserve to be things I actually own. So do the films. So do the records. So do the books.

Press Buy. Then check whether you bought anything.