It’s not that I don’t get the appeal of having larger artwork. But the medium itself in the way it’s used and produced doesn’t make sense. The whole audio production pipeline is digital. Producers take analogue audio, introduce quantisation and digitisation errors immediately to be able to use their fancy computers to produce the music (which introduces even more errors due to all filters being digital) just to then dump that digital piece of sound into an analogue medium at the very end. Nothing is gained except the digital-analogue-conversion happens before creating the medium whereas with CDs you do it after reading from that medium. Which is a stupid idea, as dust and other issues will then mess with the result you’re hearing.
Now, if you’re a producer that actually uses an all-analogue workflow, ignore this, I don’t mean you. You also have my deepest respect for enduring that pain. Please point me towards some records that actually did this though.
One thing that I can say that it is useful for is finding music that you will never find on streaming sites.
I love going to the thrift store and finding an album with interesting artwork or something that looks kooky or weird and then bringing it home and playing it.
Like, did you know that the original Dumbledore, Richard Harris, was also a musician and released a couple of albums? Now, I bought the album, not knowing who he was, realizing that his face looked familiar, looking him up and going, oh shit, this is Dumbledore music!
And after listening to it, it was pretty terrible, which explains why he went into acting, but it was still an event that never would have happened had I only relied on streaming services.