There's one (related) difference - an LP can hold approx. 45 minutes of music, a CD can hold 80-ish (The original spec called for 74, but I think the most I've seen on a single disc is 82-ish minutes).

Unless an artist is very disciplined, that means what would be a decent album at 40 minutes worth of music in LP days would be half an album today.

Again, this is a shortcoming in people, not in the medium itself - after all, a stellar 40-minute album can be released on CD, too.

I have heard expressed many times, though, the expectation that a CD should be 'full' in order to be a proper product - or, for that matter, the artist can be less severe in the cutting room, seeing as 'Oh, we've got room for that one, too ...'

I'd much rather have a condensed album which is mostly great than the same songs mixed with as many tunes which ought have been left in the archives pending a 'Collector's edition', 'Complete outtakes' or similar.

Then again (again!), at least a CD lets you skip the filler and listen only to the good stuff - at the risk of losing some of the recording artist's vision. Which, again, is a matter of (lacking) self-discipline. The LP raises the bar for skipping songs, hence forcing us weak souls (I count myself among them!) to listen to the full work, as the artist intended.

Or, at least as the artist intended before 'new release' meant uploading a new song to streaming services, making the album - as a somewhat cohesive collection of songs - a niche product.

Apropos nothing, the latest album I bought is a CD which arrived in the mail today, and it clocks in at 55 minutes and 20 seconds. Picked up a handful of LPs last week, though.

> There is no magic sauce killer feature unique to vinyl.

Old-school DJing! Imagine carefully positioning the laser on a CD...

Adressing your points:

Music may have been a bigger culturual force during the heights of vinyl record sales. Whether that translated to better music or whether it is some form of survivorship bias: I don't know. In fact I doubt it. But there is something to the music that happened when it was new, e.g. Punk music was better when everybody was still trying to figure out what is punk and what isn't, while today it feels like most bands just copy was has been made in the past. You can extrapolate the same idea to many other genres that developed. So was the music better on average? Probably not. Was it more exiting and had more impact on society, fashion, culture? For sure.

As for vinyl: I agree that digital is superior in terms of sound quality. Nearly every vinyl record is pressed from a digital master nowadays after all. Even those who want "vinyl warmth" could have that easily emulated in digital nowadays. Digital is endlessly flexible, you could theoretically envision (and some have done) a vinyl experience that is purely digital under the hood – or you could do whatever netflix is doing.

But in practise vinyl comes with the experience, forces you to do the ritual, to listen to the whole album, is immensly direct (just the waveform pressed into the material) etc. This is a limitation if vinyl is all you have, but in times where you could listen to 10 nameless streams of sounds at once for the whole day that limitation has become a popular feature. I have friends with pressing plants and all of them have more job offers than they could realistically fulfill for years now.

I'd advice against too easily dismissing the value of the ritual a technological dispositif forces onto the people interacting with said technology. Listening to a vinyl record in a time where people rarely ever sit down and just listen to music in a concentrated way is a thing people look for. Those who say it is because vinyl is technically superior are wrong, but the limitations and the listening habits a technology enforces are unseparably a part of the technology itself. And if you are looking for what vinyl gives you, vinyl is the thing that gives it to you best.