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.
Amen.
People who had formative experiences of listening to music on vinyl associated the crackle/distortion (“warmth”) and the ritual of putting a record on with positive feelings. Eventually, this evolved into the idea that vinyl is inherently authentic in itself (even for music that wasn’t released on vinyl the first time around, like 90s grunge), an idea close to that of vinyl records having souls which CDs and digital files lack.
The recording companies did their best to help this along: other than the margins being higher now that it has gone from being an outdated technology to a luxury format, you can’t pirate vinyl (well, you can, but you just get the lower quality without the magic of the whole package, as anyone who listened to tapes recorded off vinyl records knows). Given how they tried and failed to make copy-protected CDs that play in CD players but cannot be ripped (there’s no provision for DRM in the Red Book CD standard, so any attempts depend on breaking the standard and hoping that it affects the pirates and only them), the death of CDs, and their replacement by collectible vinyl and DRM-encrypted streaming services couldn’t come a day too soon.