Physical music formats offer insightful experiences that transcend convenience and technical perfection.
Nearly every news outlet seems to be reporting on 2026 as the great return to old ways of living, a collective swing back against the algorithmic, streaming-heavy world we’ve built around ourselves. It’s a topic that continues to fascinate me; on some level, we all recognize how much our music listening and viewing habits have shifted, both subtly and dramatically, through these technological leaps and newly established norms.
At the risk of sounding like that one annoying friend who makes a turntable their entire personality, I have to say that choosing vinyl as my physical music format has been one of the best decisions I’ve made in the past year. It’s not about chasing some mythical “high-fidelity” sound (which depends on a complex web of factors that can’t be reduced to “vinyl just sounds better”), but about the insights, habits, and experiences that physical formats provide.
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Lost In The Digital Abyss
In his recent article for The New Yorker entitled “Why Albums Drop and Movies Launch,” writer Brady Brickner-Wood discusses how artists today are generally having difficulties promoting their albums: despite incredible streaming success, their works essentially disappear into a cacophony of AI-fueled playlists and algorithms.
“One no longer purchases an album—one purchases a subscription service that grants access to basically every album and song ever made,” he writes. “When a new album comes out, a representative single is featured on an editorial or algorithmicized playlist alongside a hundred other new songs. If a listener likes what she hears, she can further explore a record, then relegate personal favorites into her own customized playlist, turning the album into a menu instead of a meal.”
An artist might drop an album only for its songs to land briefly on Spotify’s “New Music Friday” playlist, before being pushed aside as the next wave of cherry-picked releases rolls in week after week. Brickner-Wood notes, however, that there are clear exceptions: mega pop stars like Taylor Swift, who have built massive, devoted audiences that actively await new work and consume it in full. Yet the writer raises another valid point, which is that Swift began cultivating her record-shattering fanbase at a time when listeners were encouraged to purchase her albums as complete works, whether digitally or in physical formats like CDs, fostering a start-to-finish listening experience.
Where’s Your Sense Of Exploration?
Beyond that, the streaming format has made it harder to develop a personal sense of taste, as algorithms increasingly handle the decision-making about what we’re supposed to be listening to, based on what they think we like. I’m not painting this as a bad thing per se, especially when the codes get it right and I end up discovering great artists, but there’s a point where the experience starts to feel redundant.
Songs blur together in the background until I can’t quite tell which one I liked, what’s currently playing, or even who the artist is. The same tracks repeat, looping endlessly as they feed off my listening habits. I’m not one who easily leaps into things that completely deviate from my preferences; that said, I still enjoy my fair share of surprises and dynamism. A song I wouldn’t have usually liked might pique my interest due to striking arrangements, or maybe an artist who isn’t my cup of tea releases an album that changes my perspective. Don’t knock it ‘til you try it, as they say.
One of my favorite music writers, Hanif Abdurraqib, says it best in a piece for The New Yorker: “the platforms through which we consume music try to seduce us with the comforts of what we already like.” Yet part of what makes engaging with any art form so rich is the act of grappling with the novel, experimental, and unfamiliar.
What The Tangible Teaches You
Physical media has always been a prevalent part of our household. My youth fell somewhere between the life and “death” of physical media (it’s never really been dead, just in hibernation waiting for its next comeback). My dad hardly throws things away, so I grew up surrounded by old records, a greasy but functioning turntable, CDs, and stacks of DVDs. But last year was the year I decided to start building on what we had, adding vinyl albums of my own and investing in a new turntable.
It hasn’t turned me into a hardcore audiophile or an expert by any means, but the journey has brought me back to a time when listening felt more intentional. So here’s my little list of things that getting back to a physical music format has taught me—and what I think it offers anyone looking to return to it.
When You Play It, You Mean It
Physical media is the epitome of intention. Vinyl isn’t exactly cheap, unless you get lucky during a sale, and the same goes for most physical formats. Building my library became a far more deliberate process as a result. I can’t just buy every album I’ve ever loved (or every shiny new release), play a few tracks, skip around, and move on. Every record counts.
That reality pushes you to choose albums that actually matter, not ones that merely serve as background noise. My general philosophy is to focus on those where each song feels virtually unskippable, or at the very least, records built around concepts I genuinely love, the kind I know I’ll play a frankly ridiculous number of times on repeat.
Not to mention, vinyl has you rifling through your stash, picking an album, dusting it or brushing it carefully, placing it on the turntable (cleaning its needle), and hitting play. Then when one side is finished, it asks you to get up and flip it to the other if you want to finish it or play the other tracks. Nothing happens without reason, and that’s a comforting kind of observance that brings you back into yourself, helping you connect more to what you’re actually listening to.
Appreciate The Work As The Artist Intended
An album is a collection of songs meant to be experienced in the order an artist intended. But streaming and online platforms have made it easy to skip tracks, cherry-pick favorites, rearrange them into playlists, and be done with it. There’s no need to sit with the whole work when we can bypass songs we don’t immediately vibe with and jump straight to the hits that crack the Billboard Hot 100.
That point-and-choose approach strips away the essence of the art form. Just as we wouldn’t skip chapters in a book (“I only read chapters five and ten!”) or watch five random minutes of a film’s denouement, the album, too, deserves to be respected as a complete work. The most disciplined and devoted will be able to do this even on a streaming platform, but what physical media does is remove that element of “this or that.” When you buy a whole album, you buy the songs you might not like as much or even hate. But it’s what the artist intended, and physical media says “Leave it as is.”
What’s interesting is that I own plenty of albums where certain songs feel obscure or underwhelming on first listen, only to grow on me over time. That’s mainly because I’m kind of compelled to just sit with the piece and soak it in, each time I put on the record.
A Sense Of Ownership
There’s also a special kind of magic in the sense of ownership that physical media provides. Come hell or high water—barring disasters that might destroy your collection—it’s always there when you want it. Streaming services, by contrast, are finicky: songs can disappear due to licensing issues, regional restrictions, or seemingly on a whim. Miss a subscription payment or decide to cancel, and you lose easy access to the works you love. Physical media allows you to return to your favorites whenever you want, no internet connection or monthly fees required. Once it’s yours, it’s yours, no strings attached.
The tangible, sensory aspects of physical media only heighten that joy. There’s the act of opening a vinyl for the first time, sliding it from its sleeve, feeling its weight, admiring the press, pulling out liner notes, and tracing your way through the lyrics. Special pressings are often filled with images of the artist, becoming artworks in their own right, pieces you can display and live with as the music plays.
Combining Two Worlds
This isn’t a piece bashing music streaming services, they definitely have their uses. As I’ve mentioned, I’ve discovered countless new artists through them. It’s less a matter of “digital bad, analog supreme” and more a question of how to blend the best of both worlds. Personally, Spotify has become a testing ground; I can explore artists, dig through their discographies, and access albums digitally with ease. I listen to them in full, and if they click, I make the decision to buy the album as a vinyl.
A record collection, and physical media as a whole, serves a different purpose: not meant to replace but to bring us back to a time when listening was a ritual, rather than a given, one we inhabit fully and deliberately.
