For the average 20-something in 2026, morning rituals might involve coffee, eggs, and an ever-spiraling digital “pit of despair.”
That’s how James Dutton, a 24-year-old social media account manager in Cincinnati, described the feeling of waking up to a flurry of bank notifications in a video posted to YouTube last month. One day it’s $15 for a streaming service he hasn’t opened in weeks; the next, it’s $10 for a music platform that just got a price hike. A month ago, he audited his subscriptions spending, and realized he was bleeding $120 a month into the digital void.
“I mean, it all adds up,” Dutton told Fortune. “I felt like I could just allocate those funds to better resources than subscriptions that I really don’t even want to begin with.”
Dutton isn’t alone. Subscription-based streaming services have come off their peak during the pandemic years, and young Americans in particular are staging a quiet coup against the subscription economy.
Many are now trading their basic-tier, ad-ridden interfaces for the clunky, scratchy, and strangely beautiful world of physical media. From the neon-lit aisles of independent video stores to the vinyl-covered walls of starter apartments, Gen Z is leaving convenience behind to finally hold onto something that’s theirs.
Having everything and owning nothing
The love affair with streaming was built on a promise: everything you want, everywhere you go, for the price of a few coffees. Netflix was first to burst out in the early 2010s, its appeal broadened by the inclusion of star-power and big-budget original shows and movies. By 2020, subscription services had become so mainstream that locked-down living rooms across America played host to streaming wars, now featuring industry heavyweights including Disney, HBO, and Amazon.
But in 2026, streaming has lost a lot of steam. People are still more likely to use streaming than cable or satellite services, but the rate of new signups is slowing down. Subscription growth across all the main streamers dipped to 7% last year, down from 12% in 2024 and the first recorded year of single-digit growth, according to Antenna, a subscription economy data provider.
Subscription fatigue has set in in America. The average consumer has 4.5 active subscriptions going simultaneously and pays $924 for them, according to Forbes. And perhaps none are as done with renting their entire entertainment libraries from the cloud as Gen Z.
Between December and January, 37% of Gen Z subscribers said they had canceled one or more streaming services that month because of subscription fatigue and another 29% said they planned to do so soon, according to data from Civic Science, a consumer analytics platform. A whopping 87% of Gen Z respondents reported feeling some level of fatigue with the subscription economy.
The financial burden is one thing, but for many Americans, subscription ubiquity has come to represent all the ways modern-day America makes ownership of anything difficult. Even buying a digital copy of a movie or a TV show isn’t true ownership, as what users are actually purchasing is a revocable license to watch it that can be removed if the streamer loses distribution rights.
Rudy Ramirez is a 38-year-old medical IT worker and YouTuber outside Atlanta, GA. He’s a Seinfeld lover, he said in a video posted last month, and has a Netflix account to watch the 90s sitcom. But if he had to use the streamer’s top subscription tier, nearly $300 for a year, he says he’d be better off just buying a physical boxset of the show for around $100, and then keep it.
“Anything that’s digital is never yours,” Ramirez told Fortune. “Amazon’s not going to come into your house and take your DVD movies. They’re yours forever.”
The analog rebellion
As subscription numbers start to contract, interest in physical entertainment goods is heading the opposite direction. Take vinyl: In 2024, revenues from vinyl record sales grew 7% to $1.4 billion, according to the Recording Industry Association of America, its 18th consecutive year of growth. In 2023, vinyl purchases surpassed CD sales for the first time since 1987. Sales of luxury and indie print magazines and photo books have also surged, particularly among young audiences. In 2026, there’s even rebounding interest in retro items that aren’t even on production lines anymore, from vintage gaming consoles to iPods.
This isn’t just a trend for nostalgic middle-aged collectors; Gen Z are the ones leading the charge.
Just take a look at the corner of an intersection in northeast Los Angeles, where a historic cinema has become the life of the neighborhood in recent years. In 2023, the site opened as a new location of Vidiots, a non-profit that is part video rental store, movie theater, and community gathering place. When Robbie McCluskey, director of the video store and the non-profit’s volunteer program, started working at Vidiots in 2013, the average renter was 50 or over. Now, he says, the store is swarmed by people in their mid-to-late 20s.
“It doesn’t seem like it’s a fad to me at all,” McCluskey told Fortune, pointing out that his shop now rents out over 1,000 movies a week—a number higher than even their busiest periods in the early 2000s. For these young cinephiles, browsing the aisles of a physical store has become a social ritual. Instead of turning to an algorithm, all they have to go on are human recommendations and the tactile, imperfect joy of holding a disc.
Streaming probably won’t disappear any time soon—it’s too convenient for too many people, McCluskey said, and few young Americans live in a place with a video rental store and youth community center rolled into one. But for a generation that has spent their entire lives being entertained by an algorithm, popping a disc into a player, sitting back, and knowing that their viewing experience won’t be interrupted by slow Internet seems almost radical.
“I think it’s pretty cool that people are giving a damn about physical media again,” Dutton said in his video. “It looks like physical media is here to stay.” Or, at the very least, it won’t whisk away $20 for a subscription you forgot about to watch a show you’ve already seen five times.
