[ewmiller]

Check out discogs.com. Most music listeners don't covet their physical media anymore, but there are still millions of people globally who buy and trade vinyl, and even CDs.

Anecdotally, I have a friend who collects rare underground CDs from the mid-2000's because vinyl hadn't been revived yet and digital streaming wasn't big yet, so some bands who were only active during that time only ever put out CDs. And personally I have a few dozen vinyl albums that came out in the last 10 years.

With the vinyl revival, I expect album art will still continue to be important to niche music collectors, and any artist who releases in full-album format (many artists just do singles now, so that won't apply to them I'm sure).

[allenu]

Yeah, interestingly I've been buying vinyl from independent artists when I can, and usually they'll include codes to download the digital format. I finally bought a record player a few months ago and have been enjoying the experience of just focusing on playing one album at a time.