Today, I just noticed that I’ve been listening to whole albums start to end instead of either my playlists, or generated by Spotify.
Edit: and just in time, one of my favorite youtuber dropped this video about listening to whole albums https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4cJmPkL9a0
I grew up with cassettes a bit and mostly CD, but yeah I love albums again. Old ones definitely has an overall theme at the very least the artist wants to say.
CDs did make it a lot easier to make your own mixed playlist. But even until the mp3 and iPod era I still just listen to albums IIRC.
It’s not until streaming became mainstream when I mostly listened to playlists. The interim between mp3 players slowly dying and streaming became popular I think I hardly listened to music much.