It’s not that I don’t get the appeal of having larger artwork. But the medium itself in the way it’s used and produced doesn’t make sense. The whole audio production pipeline is digital. Producers take analogue audio, introduce quantisation and digitisation errors immediately to be able to use their fancy computers to produce the music (which introduces even more errors due to all filters being digital) just to then dump that digital piece of sound into an analogue medium at the very end. Nothing is gained except the digital-analogue-conversion happens before creating the medium whereas with CDs you do it after reading from that medium. Which is a stupid idea, as dust and other issues will then mess with the result you’re hearing.
Now, if you’re a producer that actually uses an all-analogue workflow, ignore this, I don’t mean you. You also have my deepest respect for enduring that pain. Please point me towards some records that actually did this though.
It has its uses. There’s a thing called ‘rap music’ where people just spoke drivel over bits of music they had stolen. Like olde fashioned AI it went viral with the kids and was largely focused upon scraping needles on plastic to make the noises.
There’s also another niche they called ‘dance music’ that’s been knee deep in this tech too.
It depends what you are doing, if you are just wanking at home to Coldplay with the heaphones on, vinyls might interrupt the flow of the evening. If you are doing the silver tongued devil routine at the local bar then having some bearded crusty on the vinyls might be just the ticket to success.