When I had a 28.8k and eventually 56k modem and had to download individual songs off of Napster and then Kazaa, of course it made sense to have a local download because that was the only viable option. I could download music while using AIM or IRC, but that would eat heavily into the limited bandwidth that I had.
I eventually convinced my parents to upgrade to a 1.5Mbps cable connection when I was a senior in high school. That was when Oink's Pink Palace was a thing. I downloaded tons and tons of music and basically filled up the what was at the time absolutely massive 500gb hard drive with music. If something had a lot of people leeching I'd download it just to get my seed:leech ratio up. If I liked a single song from an artist I'd go and download their entire discography.
Unfortunately that all came crashing down when that hard drive failed and I had no backup (maybe smarter/richer kids had backup drives, but I did not). I realized then that the whole thing was silly. I hadn't listened to half the music I downloaded. It was more an addiction to collecting music rather than listening to it.
Eventually Spotify came around and that basically killed my desire to hoard music. I currently use Apple Music for the majority of my music listening needs. If there is something that I cannot find on there I might still download it. I've even added some songs with Apple's service to host your files on the cloud so I can listen to it on all my devices. I feel much freer to explore music rather than spend my time figuring out how to download and store it which is wonderful.
I know that movies are not the same as music and the services are frankly much worse. It doesn't take nearly as much bandwidth to stream high quality music than it does to stream movies, especially with all the various technologies like Dolby and what not. Still, I do think that it is unnecessary to maintain massive collections of them in formats that are degrading sitting on your shelf or as digital versions taking up a ton of space and care to ensure data integrity. I know there are people that download movies and shows onto their home servers just to have them or just in case someone who has access to their plex wants to watch it.
DVDs, CDs and Blu-Rays have a limited shelf life. If you take care of them they may last long enough for you to pass them on to your children, but you're just placing a burden of leaving behind a ton of things that aren't really important to you or them. Having recently gone through trying to clear my grandparents' house full of junk, I would not want to place that burden on my future children. If they are really meaningful to you then by all means, keep them. But I don't think most of them are. Maintain a small collection of the genuinely important ones. Make sure to get copies that aren't beholden to the whims of licensors/distributors... but maybe don't stress too much about the rest.
I eventually convinced my parents to upgrade to a 1.5Mbps cable connection when I was a senior in high school. That was when Oink's Pink Palace was a thing. I downloaded tons and tons of music and basically filled up the what was at the time absolutely massive 500gb hard drive with music. If something had a lot of people leeching I'd download it just to get my seed:leech ratio up. If I liked a single song from an artist I'd go and download their entire discography.
Unfortunately that all came crashing down when that hard drive failed and I had no backup (maybe smarter/richer kids had backup drives, but I did not). I realized then that the whole thing was silly. I hadn't listened to half the music I downloaded. It was more an addiction to collecting music rather than listening to it.
Eventually Spotify came around and that basically killed my desire to hoard music. I currently use Apple Music for the majority of my music listening needs. If there is something that I cannot find on there I might still download it. I've even added some songs with Apple's service to host your files on the cloud so I can listen to it on all my devices. I feel much freer to explore music rather than spend my time figuring out how to download and store it which is wonderful.
I know that movies are not the same as music and the services are frankly much worse. It doesn't take nearly as much bandwidth to stream high quality music than it does to stream movies, especially with all the various technologies like Dolby and what not. Still, I do think that it is unnecessary to maintain massive collections of them in formats that are degrading sitting on your shelf or as digital versions taking up a ton of space and care to ensure data integrity. I know there are people that download movies and shows onto their home servers just to have them or just in case someone who has access to their plex wants to watch it.
DVDs, CDs and Blu-Rays have a limited shelf life. If you take care of them they may last long enough for you to pass them on to your children, but you're just placing a burden of leaving behind a ton of things that aren't really important to you or them. Having recently gone through trying to clear my grandparents' house full of junk, I would not want to place that burden on my future children. If they are really meaningful to you then by all means, keep them. But I don't think most of them are. Maintain a small collection of the genuinely important ones. Make sure to get copies that aren't beholden to the whims of licensors/distributors... but maybe don't stress too much about the rest.