This process forced the listener and the musicians to pay more attention. With the advent of 100 CD carousels, music became wallpaper and people became far less demanding of the records they bought. With a click of the thumb you were on the next track or next album. It doesn't matter, it's all just bits and bytes in the endless data stream. CDs have also reduced everything to a sterile, risk-free sameness.
Art is so small and trapped behind a lucite box like a butterfly suffocated behind glass.
The disks are glossy, silver, futuristic objects more suited to the clicking and chiming of ones and zeros than to the sounds of metal and wood and sweat. Records were a glorious reflective black, like the color of a hoodlum's jacket. You looked at them and saw your own face through a glossy prism of night. The sleeves were paper and cardboard, which you could cut your fingers on or even clean your stash with. And the size of an album signified the importance that it had in your life.