For roughly 120 years, music lovers liked to own what they listened to. We bought vinyl records, four-track cartridges, tapes, CDs, and so on, and stacked them pedantically in our living rooms. We wanted our tunes close and available, and the physicality of the sleeves and minutiae of the liner notes was part of the experience. Until one day it wasn’t. Though vinyl continues to have a niche, in 2017 many of us make do with Spotify, or a similar subscription service. It’s the same with movies and TV. Nobody in their right mind would buy hundreds of DVDs or Blu-ray discs now, especially at $20 a pop. Netflix does much the same job, and if it doesn’t, we can call on any number of other on-demand services.

You can see this process of dematerialization in lots of areas of life. We store files in the cloud rather than on a computer. We take Ubers and Zipcars instead of buying cars (millennials are purchasing cars […]