Wall of Text warning!
I'm not quite sure what you see as being a problem, other than, as you seem to have described it, unknown artistes unable to get their music well known. But surely this is not the case, with platforms like Bandcamp, Soundcloud and even YouTube now, it should be much easier for bands to get their music noticed? In the "good ol' days", back when I were a nipper, and as Plankton has already explained, you really had few choices if you a) wanted to hear music or b) wanted to play music. For a: buy it, get a loan off a friend or tape it off the radio. For b: gig, hope to be discovered, shop your demo tape around. Now we have all kinds of outlets for music (including the bloody X Factor!) which makes much of this redundant. So what is the problem?
As your username denotes, you appear to work in or own or at least be involved in a vinyl music store, so is that your problem: that you can't sell vinyl? But then, there's a resurgence in this, as described in a thread made yesterday, so I still don't see the problem. But to answer your basic question without leaning into or worrying about any agenda, hidden or otherwise, I was of the generation that bought LPs and singles, played them on turntables (which we called record players back then) and slowly CDs came onto the scene, for a brief shining moment Minidiscs, then recordable CDs and shortly after that MP3s took over. With the explosion of availability of music on the internet, I can and do download tons of new artistes and albums that I would a) not have bothered with in my youth and b) could not have afforded. So the current situation, from a music buyer's point of view (or, as you say, a listener) is fine. The state of music - some music - on the other hand, and the way it's handled these days, well, that's a story for another thread.
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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018
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