This is what happens when your entire music library lives in the cloud.
Streaming made music feel limitless—millions of songs, always ready, always on. But when Spotify crashed in April 2025, that illusion collapsed. The silence hit harder than expected.
Playlists vanished. Downloads failed. Routines broke. Suddenly, more people began to wonder: maybe those still spinning CDs and flipping vinyl had a point.
Sure, streaming makes things easier. But when it stops working, it reminds us just how little of it we truly own.
When the Stream Stops, the Silence Is Deafening
On April 16, 2025, Spotify went dark for millions of users worldwide. What began as scattered reports quickly escalated into one of the platform’s most disruptive outages in recent memory.
Spotify restored service later that morning, but frustrations lingered, especially for users who experienced recurring glitches throughout the day.
This wasn’t a one-off event, though. In fact, the 2025 incident was just the latest in a growing list of major disruptions in the last five years alone, including:
- March 2022: A particularly large outage that affected over 175,000 users, many of whom were abruptly logged out of their accounts.
- April 2023: A three-hour outage disrupted core functions, including streaming and integration with smart speakers.
- August 2024: Users experienced playback loops, app crashes, and a nonfunctional web version—again without immediate explanation.
With every new disruption, Spotify’s reputation as a seamless, always-on service erodes. And each crash raises a bigger question:
For those whose music collections exist entirely in the cloud, the answer is clear: streaming isn’t just convenient—it’s fragile. And that fragility has revived an old argument:
Maybe CD and vinyl collectors were right all along.
Why Physical Media Still Matters
For years, CD and vinyl collectors were seen as nostalgic outliers—devotees of an outdated past. But in today’s streaming-dominated world, their persistence no longer looks sentimental—it looks smart.
When Spotify went down, collectors kept listening. Their music lives on shelves, not servers. No crashes. Just music. That’s the core of the divide: streaming offers convenience and abundance. But physical formats offer something fundamentally different:
- Ownership: The music is yours—not rented or licensed.
- Durability: No DRM, no disappearing albums, no outages.
- Audio Quality: Full-fidelity, lossless sound with no compression.
- Independence: No buffering, no ads, no algorithm interference.
Vinyl has seen a major revival.
In 2022, over 5.5 million records were sold in the UK alone, according to SAE. Beyond its analog warmth, vinyl offers ritual. Dropping the needle isn’t just functional—it’s intentional. As Bartmanski and Woodward put it, vinyl helps listeners “crystallize a sense of self with a history stretching back in time.”
And while vinyl takes the spotlight, compact discs are making a quiet return, particularly among audiophiles and younger fans seeking more control over what they hear and own.
CDs offer digital clarity, consistent playback, and long-term permanence. No outages. No compression. No reliance on cloud servers. Just a self-contained, high-fidelity copy of your favorite music.
The Illusion of Ownership
Streaming platforms like Spotify offer access to millions of songs. But access isn’t ownership.
Spotify Wrapped illustrates this illusion. The year-end recap turns listening data into identity—your top artists, most-played tracks, and favorite genres, all neatly packaged for sharing. But it’s all just a marketing campaign—not a music collection.
You can’t pass it down, resell it, or hold it in your hands. And when the platform goes offline, your curated identity disappears with it.
There’s no denying the appeal of streaming. It’s fast, social, and personalized. But it’s also fleeting. What you’re building on these platforms is access—not legacy.
Beyond user experience, there’s also the matter of artist support.
A physical purchase, on the other hand, is a direct and tangible investment in an artist’s work. You own the sound. You support the creator.
What Collectors Always Knew
Collectors have long insisted that music isn’t just something to consume—it’s something to curate, collect, and connect with. That emotional bond is harder to build with content that lives entirely online.
Owning a physical album—whether it’s the texture of a vinyl sleeve or the snap of a CD case—offers something more than access. It offers permanence.
So what were CD and vinyl collectors right about?
- That music is more than a file—it’s a memory, a possession, a part of your identity.
- That convenience can’t replace emotional and material connection.
- That platforms may fail—but your collection can last.
In a time when access is mistaken for ownership, physical formats offer something increasingly rare: certainty. When your music lives on a shelf, and no server crash can take it away.