http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/06/fashion/our-bare-shelves-our-selves.html

Having grown up in a home with thousands of records and books, and with free, unstructured access to 
all of it, I can say that the exposure absolutely formed the person I am. Much more so than formal 
education or any other "structured" learning.

Somewhat ties into my point about the vinyl niche -- artifacts are important to the whole artistic 
experience. Recorded music doesn't exist in a vacuum, but downloads with sparse and inaccurate 
metadata, and players that make it difficult or impossible to retrieve any information about the 
artist, song, lyrics or wider context, put the music in a one-song-per-listen vacuum, which 
deminishes it and, apparently, reduces it to background noise as far as how much it matters in the 
lives of many young people. My bet is that, for those fewer young people who locked into it as more 
than background noise, the vinyl niche is their connection to the bigger context.

-- Tom Fine