You are missing the point. You can't just separate the music in the equation. I'm collecting music when I collect vinyl. There are different ways of collecting music, e.g. tape cassettes, CDs, vinyl, digital downloads, saving favorites via streaming etc. I'm using records as the method for collecting music. As a medium it's actually opened my musical horizons even further. And as a medium it has an overall impact on how I experience my music, on listening to music. Millions of other people find the same thing. Many young people report that the experience of physical LPs seems to positively enhance their connection when listening to music, it becomes less background and more intentional listening. And they have found themselves via rifling through their parents collections, or going to record stores etc finding and falling in love with all types of music they otherwise wouldn't have known about, or given the time of day.
If a music lover is thrilled by collecting and listening to their music on records in 2021, why not?
Take a look at some vinyl forums (which included many newly in to vinyl):
https://www.reddit.com/r/vinyl/
https://www.reddit.com/r/OSTvinyl/
There are clearly a lot of people very happy to have started collecting records during the recent vinyl revival. It strikes me as bizarre to presume
it is inadvisable.
Unfortunately I see a lot of vinyl skepticism on this forum being a case of "
I know not of what I speak." By that I don't mean, don't know anything about vinyl. Plenty here grew up with vinyl and have plenty of knowledge. What I mean is people who aren't actually personally interested in vinyl are the least likely to care about why other people are in to it, and hence tend to not be able to think much beyond their own attitudes, instead of trying to understand the various, often sensible reasons many around the world are currently in to vinyl. You get some pretty naive pop-psychology out of this "just for hipsters, but not if you are serious about music or audio" type stuff.
I was actually vinyl-only for 15 years before I started comparing to CDs (now having done over 800 comparisons) and then I sold a lot of my records, although I still have many.
I think you capture very well a lot of the attraction to vinyl, which in many cases (not all) has nothing to do with the sound:
It's a "fault" of the medium that you have to flip it half-way through, so you become more attentive. It's a "fault" of the medium that you have to manually and carefully lower the cartridge into the groove, so you become more attentive, and it's also a "fault" of the medium that you have to manually and carefully move the cartridge if you want to skip a song instead of pushing a button on a remote for a CD player or create a playlist without that song on a computer. It's a "fault" of the medium that it takes up so much space instead of much less space, such as a CD, or even less space, like a mini-disc, or even less space, like data on a hard drive.
But all of these things are "fun" to many people, and these faults are then being called positive attributes, because geeky people like those geeky things - big covers, beautifully designed turntables, trying out different cartridges, the slow, meticuous process of taking a record out of its cover, putting it on the turntable, etc. The whole tactile pleasure of vinyl as well as the constant hunt for records was probably what was most difficult for me to let go off when I gave up vinyl.
I have a friend who got into vinyl at the same time as me (1998), and he sold most of his enormous collection (mostly one genre, as he was a dj), then later started buying records again, but when he started collecting again it was a purely material thing, because he hasn't opened any of the records he bought, and he streams everything on Spotify.
So, vinyl has such a great appeal that people will buy it without even bothering to listen to it - and my friend is far from the only one. 50 % of people who buy vinyl today don't even own listen to it or own a turntable, one study found.
I haven't even commented on cases where vinyl editions also sound much better than the digital versions to me (and to most people on ASR I'm sure), even though I've found many cases of just that.
Lastly, hopefully we can all agree that the visual and emotional aspect is a much bigger part of audiophilia and/or record collecting than most people want to admit. There is pride of ownership with records as records will make you admired by other collectors and audiophiles as someone "cool" and "in the know", and there's a visual aestethic to records, so much so that almost every woman who has come to my house in the last 2½ years (around 30 of them), and none of them have cared particularly about music, has gone straight to look at my records (one called them "a collection of jewels") rather than look at my more or less equally large CD collection.
Besides that particular visual and tactile aspect there's the visual aspect of the playback equipment with its slow, visual rotation, tonearms, cartridges, counterweights, record clamps, brushes, etc. CD players give absolutely none of that visual appeal except for a digital display and, if you're lucky, slightly sleek design to an otherwise completely square black or silver box. Rega makes red and green turntables. Where are the red and green CD players?
I would dare claim that in a sighted test, playing the exact same song twice in a row, from the same medium, more people would prefer the version they were being told was played on this:
Than the exact same song that they were being told was being played on this: