Here's the thing about albums vs. any other sort of medium:
1) They only hold 30 or less minutes of music per side, and it's not easy to skip songs. This kind of "forced" you to listen to songs that you normally wouldn't have listened to after hearing the first 10 seconds. After doing this several times, you become comfortable with these songs and begin to like them. This is why there are so many albums full of hits from the 50's - 70's.
2) The 12" record cover is the perfect size for artwork. Album art has created some of the most iconic images in history, and due to ever-shrinking mediums and streaming, this source of art is being lost. Why bother having an artist create something that's going to show up as a 2x2 jpg on someone's phone that they're going to look at for 3 seconds before putting it back in their pocket?
3) Lyric sheets in albums were awesome- you could read along with with the songs, and the liners sometimes had additional art or messages. An album was the original form of multi-media.
1. Totally disagree with your "you start to like them". Now, I won't dispute that modern music has a focus on singles, however I'd actually argue that podcasts are showing it absolutely has nothing to do with being forced by technological limitations that is the issue. I'd say that its because people have much more varied tastes, lots of more opportunity to be exposed to a much larger amount of artists (essentially you're going "back in the day we had to go and spend what we could on just a few albums, and so we had to listen to them and like them because otherwise we didn't have music to listen to"). I do lament the "next big thing" mentality a lot of people have where if you discuss music, it's like they're constantly going oh that's old news, have you checked out ___?" where it's like a contest to see who can mention the most obscure band, but that's quite easy to ignore. Simply put, regardless of era, there just aren't that many good entire albums. Due to the nature of culture, we'll remember the good ones more, they'll get passed on, which is why if you look at what people tend to have that's older, it tends to be better because its not worth keeping the bad stuff around for most people.
2. I hate this argument too. Even though the sleeves are actually my favorite aspect of vinyl, we have even more mediums for art, including ones that vastly outdo chintzy sleeves (that are prone to wearing poorly). I'd actually argue that music now is wider in its artistic medium. Few people can make a good living based solely on their musical ability, they have to be adept performers (pop acts with elaborate routines and costumes/etc) or need to be able to integrate their music into other mediums (TV, movies, video games). But even talking about tangible assets, there's no reason why they can't offer that, which is why we see more elaborate physical releases these days. I also think with VR and AR we're going to see a return to like the 60s and 70s, with people like Bowie, prog-rock, concept albums, and things of that nature, where the music will just be the core to a whole artistic expression. And needless to say that live stuff could be taken to a whole new level.
Oh and also now there's a lot of fan art, and a lot of it handily outdoes the typical album covers we used to get. There's even tons of "iconic" album covers that I just cringe at how bad they actually are (not that there aren't tons of bad ones to this day). Now there's a lot more ability to change that. Heck if you want you could make your own sleeves too. That was much less feasible back then.
3. That's weird, because last I checked, the internet and lyrics databases and media players that can display the lyrics while the song plays exist. I'm really baffled that you're seriously trying to make this argument. I remember that being actually more prevalent with CDs too.
Ultimately the reason I hate these type of arguments is that, your arguments have nothing to actually do with the medium. There is literally no technological reason that you can't do all of that. I regularly listen to albums and long continuous music sessions where it flows together or I listen to stuff that I can skip when I'm just wanting quick hit of a certain band or music. You can make entire albums a single file if you want. You control how intimate or shared your music is. You can talk about music more easily, you can share it easily, you can be exposed to other music more easily. Or if you just want to stick with what you like, you can do that too. I'm not arguing that you shouldn't be free to listen like you want. If you want to delude yourself that vinyl is more "pure" or have some odd love for the "ritual" of records, knock yourself out. Just stop trying to pretend that it is inherently better by arguing that its limitations (which you can freely force on yourself if you want to with non-vinyl) make it better. The point being you have control over your listening far more than ever. I don't understand how anyone can argue that is a bad thing. Likewise, artists themselves now have more control than ever over their work, so its not like you can't have both.
That's a damn impressive collection, though.
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