My preferred current format is buying physical CD's, and then I load them to old school iTunes and have a couple of iPods I rotate to listen to music on for the most part (by sheer coincidence I have two more old ones coming in the mail today I want to use as backups). Sometimes I get a little lazy and with bigger box sets where I don't feel like loading all the music (some of my classical ones in particular), I just listen to on a stereo and skip the iTunes completely. In either scenario, I like owning all my media and having physical backups for everything.

Years ago I started dabbling a bit in vinyl again, and while super fun and made me reappreciate how good some of the old stuff was (I even bought and cracked open some vintage stuff too like sealed original copies of the first Starz album and Judas Priest's Unleashed in the East!), I quickly realized it was going to be a rabbit hole for me and I would just keep a very modest vinyl collection of absolute favorites.

The one format I did not think I'd revisit was cassettes, while I have nice nostalgia for those years, it was game over when CD's came out for me. But some years back Metallica started re-releasing a bunch of old material including tons of rarities. The famous No Life 'Til Leather demo was only released on old school cassette! Those sneaky devils. Well, that was mandatory listening and I still had a cassette deck on one of my stereos and a boombox for that matter. It did not make me want to start a new cassette collection, but it was a nice little trip back to the past and did seem appropriate for this one since people used to copy and share stuff like this all the time back in the day, it's how you found out about more underground stuff for sure.

Metallica also did some major box set releases of their early albums, and they included a mix of tons of vinyl, CD's, DVD's, and even a few more cassettes mixed in. The ultimate physical media celebration!