Posting this here in case it’s of as much enjoyment to you all as it was me.
(Thought particularly of you, @anon30536008 — I’ve liked your musings a lot in the past while 
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Thanks for posting this Ben. Even though I am not a “collector” (which to me implies some kind of curatorial role in the sense of the kind of guy who has to have every release of a given artist or a recording of every work of a given composer), I do have a "collection " meaning a series of artefacts of which one role is to document my life and its changes from the age of about 15.
I would never confuse the above with a selection of links held in a streaming services’ “favourites” folder and in particular with the algorithms that attempt to predict , almost wholly incorrectly, what would interest me and which play no part at all in my life.
So I continue to buy recordings and retain them away from any chance of them being removed or deleted. Should the excellent streaming service I use ( Qobuz) cease to be or if it were to become run by some future bean counter( Hey guys, 80% of the tracks on our servers are never accessed so let’s delete them ) I will just think " too bad" and carry on listening to my stored files or the LPs that are physical evidence of my earlier life.
I suspect that the future negative impact of using streaming as one’s sole music source is likely to be limited to younger people who may find in 30 years that they cannot rekindle memories of that perfect summer with their first love as that Ed Sheeran track is nowhere to be found.
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