The last time I bought a physical CD album was Adele’s 25, all the way back in 2015. But that was a one-off, since by then I had already been streaming music for years. I had to get my hands on a physical copy, though, because an Adele release isn’t just any other release. It’s a moment in music history. Judging by the records it smashed, more than 22 million copies sold worldwide, we all felt the same way.

Pre-streaming, I loved the ritual of unwrapping a CD’s plastic film, flipping open the jewel case and discovering the new record for the first time. You’d rarely get the chance to preview anything beyond the lead single, so hearing the rest of the album felt genuinely exciting. It would also be the first time you’d see the artwork, read the lyrics and properly absorb the artist’s vision. Listening to an album from start to finish was a real voyage.

When the Internet happened, suddenly everyone was using Napster. At university, we were burning our own CDs, and that was really the beginning of the end. Music became all about files. There was something rebellious about dragging and dropping tracks onto rewritable discs and sharing them with friends, but did we lose some of the joy of the complete package along the way? I suppose we thought we could always go back. The record stores were still there, after all. Well, until they weren’t.

Today, there are more than 800 million paid music-streaming subscribers worldwide, with streaming accounting for around 70 per cent of global recorded music revenue. That number is astonishing when you stop to think about it. Nearly a billion people now carry the history of recorded music around in their pockets. Any song. Any artist. Any genre. I love the convenience, but I’m not sure it’s made us happier.

I recently cancelled my Spotify subscription after (another) price hike, and started considering whether I should go back to buying files so that I actually owned my music again. It felt strange. After nearly two decades of membership and thousands spent, I owned absolutely nothing the moment I deleted the app. We spend years carefully building playlists, curating favourites and teaching the algorithm who we are, only to realise none of it is really ours. Streaming has quietly transformed our relationship with music from ownership to access. We don’t collect any more, do we? Now, it feels like all we do is rent.

In the CD era, albums seemed to really matter. You’d spend money on a record and live with it for months, even if you weren’t immediately obsessed with it. I remember I used to listen to records, and think ‘oh that one will grow on me’. Now, because of the vast amount of content available, I don’t give the full album a chance. I’ll put together a playlist of all my favourites. No need to skip anything.

When almost every song ever recorded is available at the press of a button, commitment disappears. We skip faster and listen more passively. Music has become background noise to workouts, commuting and replying to emails, and even the albums themselves now sometimes feel designed around the algorithm rather than the listening experience. That’s not to say streaming has completely ruined music. In many ways, it has democratised it. People, no matter where they are in the world, now have access to the spectrum of K-Pop or even Icelandic ambient electronica. Discovery has never been richer. Algorithms can be irritatingly accurate, but occasionally they introduce you to artists you would never have found while flicking through shelves in a record store.

After cancelling Spotify, I flirted briefly with the fantasy of becoming intentional again. I imagined myself buying vinyl, downloading albums and rebuilding a carefully curated iTunes library like it was 2006. But then reality kicked in. I had become too used to consuming music conveniently. So, somewhat predictably, I came back. Only this time, I joined Deezer.

Partly, it was curiosity. Deezer offers higher-quality audio on certain plans, cleaner recommendations and less of the cultural noise that now surrounds Spotify. Spotify increasingly feels like social media with a soundtrack attached, while Deezer feels quieter and more focused on the music itself. Within days, I had slipped back into the same rhythm despite all my nostalgia.

When I spontaneously got tickets to Ariana Grande’s new tour, I didn’t need to hunt through record stores or wait weeks for deliveries to work my way through her back catalogue. It was all there instantly, including the latest release, at the touch of a button. That moment reminded me why streaming fits modern life too perfectly to disappear.

For many people under 25, physical media holds almost no emotional pull at all. A CD is closer to a novelty item than a necessity. Their relationship with music exists entirely in the cloud, through playlists shared in group chats and songs discovered via TikTok clips. They aren’t mourning record stores because they never experienced them in the first place. Vinyl may be ‘making a comeback’, but it will always come second to streaming. You can’t exactly carry your entire vinyl collection onto a plane.

And that, maybe, is the point. While I’m nostalgic for CDs, and many others are nostalgic for vinyl, if you offered most of us the choice tomorrow between carrying around binders full of discs or opening Deezer and instantly playing almost any song ever recorded, I’m fairly certain we’d choose the latter.