Seems like there was more meaning and purpose to music in the 20th century, but I admit that I am biased. Nowadays its largely pop or rap vapor downloaded to an Ipod or MP3, (the latter being a lossy codec). Most young people don't buy whole "albums" or CDs, despite them being far more "immersible", considering that in many cases, the songs included that are not "hits" get listened to and some often become favorites The other side of that coin, however, is when only a song or two are decent, and hence the "one hit wonder" becomes a band, group, or singer's everlasting label.

LPs offered much more insight into what the artists were about as well as the artwork, inserts (many including stickers, pictures, stick-pins, buttons, and posters) and graphics. The most unusual was perhaps the paper panties that were included in Alice Cooper's "Schools Out", the oblong shape of the album cover of Traffic's "The Low Spark Of High Heeled Boys", the round coin-like shape of Grand Funk's "E Pluribus Funk", the "picture" windows of the slide-off cover of Led Zeppelin's "Physical Graffiti" and the real zipper inserted into the cover of The Rolling Stones' "Sticky Fingers". There are likely more examples, but those are the ones that I could remember off the top of my head.

Some audiophiles swear by the "warm" sound of vinyl on turntables, along with vacuum-tube amplifiers. I was an early adopter of what passed in the early 70s for "surround sound" when I purchased a Quadrophonic stereo system, along with LPs that were encoded to play that format. I did the same thing in the early 90s, by purchasing an early version of a Dolby 4.1 decoder, and Dolby formatted VHS videos of rock music and bootleg recordings of full concerts (also when they were commercially available). Anyone remember SACDs? There were also briefly available, Dolby digital 5.1 audio CDs that could be played on certain DVD players that accomodated the encoded format.

Outkast, Kid Rock and Creed had albums that matched the sales Sgt. Peppers lonely hearts club band and Abbey Road had?

fucking neanderthals!

Frank Zappa used to say the "most people wouldn't know good music even if it bit them in the ass".