People have spent many decades without actually caring to own their music content. Back then they used these things called "radios" to enjoy music content without owning the collection. Streaming services today are just another evolution of listening to the radio.

Not everyone had some massive record collection and hundreds of cassette tapes.

I never have liked commercial radio. There's too little music, and too many commercials. Then of course there's the whole payola issues, and the lack of variety in the tracks played on the radio. In major markets or college towns, there might be a few stations that just play good music based on what the program director or specific jockeys want to play. Luckily, I had one near me, and it offered me a catalog of music I just wasn't going to get otherwise. So for me, the only way to hear what I considered "good" music was to collect it. I spent lunch money and other random bits of cash I'd receive as a teen solely on music.

Today, those "cool" stations have primarily been slurped up into iHateRadio / Comcast conglomerates, so commercial radio is useless. The internet is the only saving grace for kids today, but even streaming platforms don't do it for me. Sadly, youtube is about the best thing for its ubiquitous availability. Bandcamp/Soundcloud are cool, but still not the same discoverability as YT.

Even with my collection, it's still not instantly accessible as I'd like due to the manual labor of digitizing. I've tried on multiple occasions, but it's only a fraction of the collection. It's just too easy to find it with yt-dl