Comment by c256

I don’t know what things are like in other parts of the world, but the US market has shown a preference for renting large-library access over buying individual works. There are exceptions, when the costs got skewed too far and the perception grows that the “large library” is actually a small library plus a lot of dross (see Cable TV), but even then it took decades of Worst-in-the-nation service issues, billing ‘hijinks’, and predatory pricing to convince Americans to start cutting the cord.