Jake E. Lee (my favorite guitarist with Ozzy) makes a nicely perceptive argument for music on a physical carrier:
Jake E. Lee saved up his allowance to buy this album (Led Zeppelin III) and it became his favourite Led Zeppelin album. This is what he had to say on it:
“I heard “Immigrant Song” on the radio and it was such a nasty riff and a spooky song and I was like, great, this album’s going to be bitchin’. And I took it home and that’s the only song like it on the whole record. It pissed me off.
I tried to take the record back and they wanted to know why. And I said,
“Because I don’t like it”.
“You can’t bring a record back just because you don’t like it!”.
And I was stuck with it for the next month, until I could buy another new album. So it was the only new music I could listen to then. And then it grew on me. After a month, it was and still to this day is, my favorite Led Zeppelin record. And the reason I wanted to address that is, I kind of feel like our Red Dragon Cartel record “Patina” is like that, most of the songs on there aren’t immediately accessible. That’s how it was when you had to buy a physical album. Like it or not, you were stuck with it, so you listen to it a little bit more and you start to like it a little bit more."
I can totally relate to that. A lot of albums I rate as among my favorites today I did not like at all at first listen: eg Black Sabbath's Master Of Reality - I thought it way too dark and heavy at first listen, Deep Purple's Come Taste The Band - Bolin sounded so radically different to Blackmore, or David Bowie's Station To Station - I had heard only the still glammy and dystopian, yet vivid Diamond Dogs before and loved that, Station To Station was a much more somber and distanced affair. It took me endlless repeated spins until it clicked, today I can never make up my mind whether DD or STS is my all time favorite Bowie work (it's not Ziggy Stardust, I find that a bit cluttered in its T. Rex'y arrangements and not as timeless as the other two).
If I was a kid today, I'd probably never re-stream those albums again after the initial disappointment/non-comprehension.