If you don’t add as many tracks to your playlists as you used to, then you will necessarily experience thinning as distribution licenses with Spotify expire and rent-seeking labels go elsewhere in search for better profits.

I’ve always thought the whole “streaming” model completely idiotic as soon as it is not used for “mindless background entertainment”, e.g. like running a TV or Radio, but for “Music/Movies/Series I actually consciously choose”. For the latter use-case you are infinitely better off getting physical media or drm-free digital files and making sure you have proper backups. No issues with flaky internet, no “thinning” (I like to say “de-publishing”), no dependence on a given service provider still graciously allowing you to (/me looks at Amazon removing ebooks from people’s kindles), very limited data-mining/profiling of your media consumption preferences (only when you buy, and then only if you don’t use cash, not every time you listen/watch)… Just a way to play the media, whenever you want.

For a while, with their extensive catalog, Spotify enabled both behaviors, which removed the need for a separate way of storing and playing back music you consciously choose. I've recently recovered my digital music collection back when I was either playing it on my computer or on my 128 MB MP3 player, but I haven't found a solution to stream it from wherever I am (laptop, smartphone, TV even) like I can do with Spotify. So for now it sits on a hard drive, unused.

Yet it was always obvious you were at their mercy if you wanted to hear a given piece again. *shrug* My Music collection easily fits on my phone in its entirety (while I also consumes a lot of physical space in my basement), no need to ever stream that anywhere. As for Movies it is true that I rarely carry a few Tebibyte of disks around, but how often do I really have the sudden urge to watch, say, the entirety of Star Trek while on the road? At home it all sits on a simple NAS that none of my devices have problems connecting to, including a fancy Kodi on a raspberry pi…