I personally love my collection (records, CD, digital) and enjoy sharing the experience with friends. I don’t use streaming unless you count soma fm at work. Sure, I’ll use YouTube to listen to some albums I don’t own, but if I truly like it I’ll buy or download it, usually on bandcamp or direct from artist if I can.
For me, I don’t believe the human brain was ever made for this level of stimulation (we shouldn’t really have 24/7 access to social media either. Go back to the “family PC” model). People have very little connection to music anymore becuase there’s too much and its too easy to access. I can barely remember all the members names in my favorite bands or all their albums. There’s little chance anyone even knows the artists of the millions of songs they’re streaming, or the story behind them.
In the before times you would buy a new album and listen to it from start to finish, several times. It was Tuesday.
I still enjoy listening to music in album form. I can think of many songs that are not discrete pieces of art without the track(s) before and after.
A local radio station once played “Golden Slumbers” without also playing “carry that weight” and they apologized for it the next day.
Metallica’s ride the lightning cassette got played in my car from beginning to end so many times
In the before before times, teenagers didn’t buy albums, they bought singles…