I miss artwork based album purchases

There are many bad aspects to the modern day music consumption via streaming services. The artist payouts are ridiculous as we all know as well other extremely awful business decisions regarding advertisers and not paying out on streams with less than a thousand plays. Physical media is best but we all know this. Aside from these horrors, one aspect that is regrettably lost is the skill/risk of buying an album based purely on the artwork. Now if you hear about an artist you can go on Spotify or YouTube and know right away if they’re for you. Buying an album based on the cover was a risk. Sometimes it paid off and sometimes it didn’t and you were stuck trying to convince yourself it was good until you could afford another album. We all had our hits and misses. When getting into metal I’d heard the names Slayer and Megadeth but I bought the albums South of Heaven and Countdown to Extinction based on the art. These were my wins. There were probably more, smaller bands that I can’t quite…