By Brandon Hernandez
I started getting heavily into music in the ninth grade this was also when i bought my first cd. It was a t-pain album, he was still cool back then and i loved looking through the albums pictures, the credits for the tracks and reading the artists thank you’s. Around this time things were turning digital musically, itunes and free downloads were kicking off, so who would go buy a cd?
There are only a handful of people that still shop for records, search through old bins of used records to find the hidden gem they wanted. Every album i buy is in its physical form, ive seen albums that if you only bought the record digitally you would have never gotten to see. For example in the new album by the dream, when you open it you can unfold the flaps inside into a 3d pyramid, if i had only gotten it from itunes or from a free downloading website, i would have missed this entirely, never knowing it was even possible to do that with an album. This causes a problem, when people caught on to the trend of digital music, it never stopped.
Many ignore the hard work that an artist puts into the pictures and concepts in their physical album. If you truly love music, then buying physical albums is the way to go. When you buy them you don’t just help the artist you help the record shops that are fighting to stay open. Many record shops even in the bay area are closing down because the handful of people that buy physical albums is not enough.