Last month I sat down and counted how many subscriptions I pay for. The number was genuinely alarming. Streaming services, cloud storage, productivity tools, news sites, fitness apps, music, podcasts, newsletters. Each one individually reasonable — a few quid here, a tenner there. Collectively, they represent a significant chunk of my monthly outgoings for things I don't own, can't keep, and will vanish the moment I stop paying.

This is the subscription economy, and it has eaten everything.

The quiet takeover

It started with software. Adobe moved from boxed products you bought once to Creative Cloud, a monthly fee that never ends. Microsoft did the same with Office 365. Then Spotify replaced the record collection. Netflix replaced the DVD shelf. Kindle Unlimited replaced the bookshop. Each transition was framed as progress — more convenient, always updated, available everywhere.

But then it spread beyond digital. Cars are leased, not bought. Razors arrive in a monthly box. Clothing rental services let you "subscribe" to fashion. Peloton charges you a monthly fee to use the bike you already paid two grand for. Even friendship has been subscribed — Patreon, membership communities, paid Discord servers, substacks with paywalls.

The logic is always the same: why own when you can access? Why commit to one purchase when you can have an ever-refreshing stream? It sounds reasonable. It sounds modern. And something about it feels profoundly wrong.

The ownership instinct

I have a bookshelf in my front room that I care about more than almost any other object I own. It's not valuable in any monetary sense. The books on it aren't first editions or rare finds. But it's mine. Every book represents a choice I made — to buy it, to read it, to keep it. The shelf tells a story about who I am. Visitors browse it and make inferences. I browse it and remember who I was when I read each one.

You don't display your subscriptions on a shelf. That's the difference between access and ownership — one shapes your identity, the other just bills you.

You can't do that with a Kindle Unlimited subscription. There's no shelf. There's no browsable collection that tells a story. There's just an app with an ever-changing catalogue of available titles, none of which feel like yours because none of them are.

The same is true of music. I grew up buying records and CDs. The collection mattered. It was curated, deliberate, personal. Each purchase was a tiny investment of money and identity — this is what I'm into, this is what I choose to keep. Spotify has access to everything, which sounds like freedom but feels like nothing. When everything is available, nothing is chosen. When nothing is chosen, nothing is meaningful.

Ownership as taste statement

Here's what the subscription economy misses: ownership is a form of self-expression. The things you choose to buy, keep, and display are taste made tangible. They're decisions that accumulate into an identity.

My record collection isn't just music I like. It's a map of my taste over twenty years. The early house records from when I first got into dance music. The ambient albums from a phase where I was obsessed with Brian Eno. The Japanese imports I hunted down because the artwork was beautiful. Each one is a node in a network of aesthetic decisions that, taken together, say something about who I am.

A subscription can't do that. A subscription is frictionless access to everything, which is the same as a committed relationship with nothing. You haven't chosen. You haven't invested. You haven't said "this, not that." And those micro-decisions — the choosing, the keeping, the discarding — are how taste is built.

I think about this with my own projects too. When I built Trove, the whole premise was that your saved links reveal your taste. Every bookmark is a signal. But a bookmark only means something if it represents a deliberate choice from an ocean of options. If you saved everything, the signal disappears. Ownership — the act of selecting and committing — is what gives things meaning.

The convenience trap

The counterargument is obvious: subscriptions are more convenient. And they are. I don't miss scratched CDs or overflowing DVD shelves or the three-hour trip to IKEA to buy another bookcase. Convenience is real and it matters.

But convenience has a cost, and the cost is attachment. When something is easy to access, it's easy to ignore. When it's easy to cancel, it's easy to forget. The friction of ownership — the effort of choosing, buying, storing, caring for — creates a bond with the object that frictionless access never can.

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The ownership test: If the service disappeared tomorrow, would you feel loss — or just mild inconvenience? If it's the latter, it's a subscription. If it's the former, you should probably own it.

I notice this with my kid. He has access to every song, every film, every show, every game — and they care about none of them. The things they actually cherish are the physical objects: a specific book, a particular toy, the football they chose at the shop. Ownership teaches value. Access teaches consumption.

What should be owned

I'm not arguing against all subscriptions. Some things genuinely work better as services. I don't want to own a server to run my email. I don't want to buy individual news articles. Some subscriptions are services, and services make sense.

But some things should be owned. Books. The tools you love and use daily. The music that soundtracks your life. The domain name for your project. The art on your wall. These aren't commodities to be accessed — they're extensions of identity. They deserve commitment.

I own the domain names for every project I've built. That might sound like a small thing, but it matters to me. modernretro.art, cultureterminal.com, oishii.london — these are mine. They're not rented from a platform. They're not subject to someone else's terms of service. They exist because I chose to make them exist, and they'll persist as long as I choose to keep them.

In an economy that increasingly wants you to rent everything and own nothing, the decision to own something is a statement. It says: this matters to me enough to commit. This isn't a trial period. This isn't month-to-month. This is mine.

That's not nostalgia talking. That's taste. Because taste, at its core, is about choosing — deliberately, permanently, with conviction. And you can't subscribe to conviction. You have to own it.