One thing I miss from physical music releases is liner notes. Not all had them, but they were a sign of class whenever they appeared: essays contextualising or illuminating the content.
Lyrics have been easy to find online since dial-up internet in the 1990s, which stood in for the lyric sheet, but I even missed the credits, so you knew who played and produced what.
An early attempt to recreate that was iTunes, but that seemed to overdo the snazzy interactive animations, and had the whiff of CD-ROM.
Apple Music has been better, expanding its own curated liner notes with most artists and significant albums. The addition of credits was very welcome.
But nothing could replicate the kind of packages my dad would get in his classical collection. Opera sets would live inside pizza-box size packages, with multiple discs and massive books. In those books were lengthy essays and, in the case of operas, full librettos in original language and translation.
Now I learn that Apple Music Classical has added digital booklets to its offering, and it’s the missing piece. All the stuff my dad used to enjoy.
Now, at last, we’re getting back to the days where the music lover can fetishise the details, not of expensive objects of days past, but of the glorious information they contained.