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.
On thing I miss is listening to full albums, i.e. you put on an album, listen to all the tracks from beginning to end in the order the artist intended. I know you still can listen to full albums now, but most software is designed these days around individual tracks and it loses something. Sometimes a well put together album can be better than the sum of its parts.
Never subscribed to a streaming service myself, I don’t see the appeal of listening to (and potentially becoming emotionally attached to) music I don’t actually own and could lose some day.
I use Apple Music and that is very album centric. You can add entire albums to your library and browse you library using an album view.
A lot of software will do that if all your music is correctly (and consistently) tagged. Depending on where you get it though it often isn’t, and it’s a lot of manual work getting all your music files tagged in a standard way.
I stream plenty but that is one of the reasons I like vinyl. Pretty much forced to listen to the album.
I pretty much only listen to albums. I enjoy the cohesiveness. Jumping around in shuffle is fine for like parties I guess. Not for me.
Some albums were meant to be listened to beginning to end, particularly starting around the Alan Parsons Abbey Road / Darkside era.
Some albums were meant to be listened to with a few songs removed.
Some albums should never have been published - the world would be much happier with a single and a B-side living the illusion that the artist can someday produce more of the same brilliance - rather than hearing proof that they didn’t.
When Pandora was $30 per year, I subscribed - when they started going to monthly only I dropped.
I don’t need, or want, an unlimited streaming service with instant access to all the world’s music. I do want access to probably 100,000+ songs of my choosing, and I do not want anything shoving stuff at me on heavy rotation because somebody paid it to.