Growing up in the mid to late 2000s, I used to be an avid music lover. I would wait for artists to drop their singles, EPs, or albums. And then I would download the entire album and listen to it on repeat. Maybe until I memorized the whole album.
I don't see this happening any more—at least in my life. I listen to songs instead of whole albums. My way of discovering new music these days is happenstance, either somebody told me it's a good song or I randomly stumbled upon it.
Now, I don't really care for an artist to drop an album and listen to it wholly. Maybe, I would listen to the most popular ones, not probably the whole album.
It's very much possible that a lot of people still wait for their favorite artists to drop the albums and then listen to it. I don't see it happening that much.
One thing is that there's too much content these days. Earlier we had mainstream bollywood music and a very few indie artists. Today the whole landscape is changed. Everybody is an artist these days. Which I don't know is a good or bad thing.
But it sure has corrupted the music in some sense. There are very few songs that have a recall value. It wasn't the case with the older songs, they are still memorable.
Even the movies don't have that many good songs. Their "good" songs are only the remakes of the originally good songs(mostly). When I was growing up, almost every movie had at least one or two songs that would go "viral"—even the ones that flopped.
Also with the onset of music streaming services it's no longer necessary to download anything, you can just have anything anytime. And then there are charts that tells you which are the songs you should listen to.
I don't think that there's a right or wrong way to consume music.
But I was building my offline library of music from when I was growing up. And I realized that how many complete albums I have added in my collection. And that took me to how we(I) would wait for new music to drop and download the whole thing on 2G network.
If not anything, it's just nostalgic.