> In a similar vein, vinyl records make the unit of music an album, and I like it in situations where the artist has created "an album" rather than "a collection of ten-ish tracks".
I don't see how this is different between a record and a CD.
I don't see how this is different between a record and a CD.
Heck, it used to be all the rage to get a three or five CD changer and shuffle the whole thing, comfortable unpredictability, forty or fifty songs you like but never knowing which is next.
You could likewise just listen to an album on your phone, in order, but it's too easy to let your distraction kick in and switch it halfway through.
It saddens me a little that, in spite of all the technology, actual Hi-Fi listening seems to have become less accessible or prevalent. I'm still not sure how much this is really for the commonly stated reason of convenience, and how much that is really cope and denial of a bigger socio-economic decline. I.e. it simply isn't as realistic for regular people to have a Hi-Fi listening space...
For comparison, median income after taxes is approx. $50,000 a year, so we're looking at less than a week's net wages.
I think it is more likely that our media consumption habits have changed - when I was a kid in the eighties, a few - like, the bank branch manager, the dentist and a few others - had a VCR at home. The rest of us had TVs, meaning we watched what was on at the time, or (once in a while) rented a VCR and a movie.
That aside, our media choices were radio, going to the cinema (not very often!) or - drumroll - recorded music.
Hence everybody had stereos. I believe my parents were quite typical - when I was a toddler, they bought a number of LPs with radio dramas for kids on them, music for kids &c - the stereo was basically the entertainment hub.
Today my family and I - wife and three kids aged 10, 12 and 16 - have between us, let's see, 2xTVs, a 40" and an 85", the latter with a 5.1 system attached, both with Apple TVs, a stereo (making us an outlier!), three ipads, three smartphones, two dumbphones, a handful of radios, three - oops, four - laptops, a PlayStation, a couple of Nintendo Switches...
There's basically so many more options to spend our media time on, and at the same time there's way more leisure activities aimed at kids now than when I was a kid, so the kids are barely at home during the week (at least it feels that way!), leaving less time (methinks) for media consumption than only a generation ago, while at the same time having many more options.
So - basically, for many, only a generation ago, the stereo was the entertainment hub and you were kind of expected to have one. Nowadays the entertainment hub is some kind of internet-connected device, and a stereo is a niche product.
But I also hear lots of people complain they don't have the living space to dedicate to a Hi-Fi nor the time to use it if they did. To me, that is a sort of erosion of quality of life compared to what the middle class used to be able to enjoy.
I believe that hi-fi is not less accessible or prevalent than in past years/decades, it's just that most people don't care (and never have).
But still, I would be shocked if I listened to any CD straight through more than once, immediately after buying it. Once straight through to hear all the tracks, and then every time after that it'd be skipping around through my favorites or shuffling on repeat until I got tired of it and switched CDs.
And then once CD burners reached my price point, it was almost nothing but mix CDs, the original albums left on a rack in case I needed to re-rip them.
But, ignoring mix tapes, I didn't really get into track-level shuffling until the MP3 era where I could shuffle a much bigger pile of tracks. I do remember that a Sony 5-disc carousel could shuffle tracks reasonably quickly. But when I used players with a 6 or 10 disc cassette, track shuffle would mean spending a lot of time listening to servo motors and occasionally disturbing clunks that evoked visions of shattered or gouged discs.
I never had one of those massive jukebox style carousels that was sort of a hybrid of the two and could quickly switch among scores or hundreds of discs. By the time I saw those as affordable, they already seemed obsolete. Instead, I was ripping my CDs to MP3 (eventually repeated to FLAC), and had a USB to S/PDIF soundcard to send audio back to my A/V receiver over optical fiber.
I think that a reasonable number of people had audio gear (boomboxes) that could play a CD and record it to tape at the same time (and also record the radio to tape).
I think that for a number of years a lot of folks used mix tapes to listen to their favourite tracks from a CD (or a number of CDs).
Unless an artist is very disciplined, that means what would be a decent album at 40 minutes worth of music in LP days would be half an album today.
Again, this is a shortcoming in people, not in the medium itself - after all, a stellar 40-minute album can be released on CD, too.
I have heard expressed many times, though, the expectation that a CD should be 'full' in order to be a proper product - or, for that matter, the artist can be less severe in the cutting room, seeing as 'Oh, we've got room for that one, too ...'
I'd much rather have a condensed album which is mostly great than the same songs mixed with as many tunes which ought have been left in the archives pending a 'Collector's edition', 'Complete outtakes' or similar.
Then again (again!), at least a CD lets you skip the filler and listen only to the good stuff - at the risk of losing some of the recording artist's vision. Which, again, is a matter of (lacking) self-discipline. The LP raises the bar for skipping songs, hence forcing us weak souls (I count myself among them!) to listen to the full work, as the artist intended.
Or, at least as the artist intended before 'new release' meant uploading a new song to streaming services, making the album - as a somewhat cohesive collection of songs - a niche product.
Apropos nothing, the latest album I bought is a CD which arrived in the mail today, and it clocks in at 55 minutes and 20 seconds. Picked up a handful of LPs last week, though.