The tactile feeling of the physical media is important.

I buy a lot of used CDs. It's a great time to buy because prices are still very low. It's not uncommon to find charity shops (a.k.a. thrift stores) in the UK selling used CDs for £0.25. At this price I don't put much effort into selecting discs, and if I don't like one I just donate it to another charity shop (ideally in another town to keep the discs circulating). I discover a lot of good music this way I wouldn't otherwise hear.

Accordingly, I shop mostly by intuition. One surprising thing I discovered is that I can do better than chance at identifying good CDs by touch. This is because jewel cases from the 80s are generally thicker and heavier than modern jewel cases. In the 80s, recording technology was expensive enough that people didn't usually have access to it unless they'd demonstrated some musical talent. In the 80s, the loudness war hadn't started and CDs were mastered on the assumption that they would be played on a good home stereo. A random CD from the 80s has a higher chance of being good than a random CD from any other decade.

Every used CD I've bought has played without audible defect. A few have circumferential scratches long enough to defeat the error correction but the error detection still works to interpolate the missing data. In a previous HN comment I wrote that I had a few with disc rot; I was mistaken and what I thought was disc rot was actually "pin holes". These are holes in the metal layer that people say are a manufacturing defect caused by contamination between the injection molding and metalization stages, and don't get worse with time. Since then, I bought one with genuine disc rot, which looks like corrosion starting from the edge of the disc. This one will probably continue to decay, but for now it also plays perfectly because the rot hasn't reached the data.

I also have two "sticky Nimbus" discs: a known manufacturing defect where Nimbus UK in the 80s used some material for label printing that becomes sticky over time. The first one I attempted to clean with a damp cloth and damaged it, the second I recognized as the same thing and didn't touch. I've heard that you can clean them with ice-cold water, but I'll just tolerate the dust and fingerprints on it. Aggressive cleaning will remove the label entirely. It doesn't affect playback.

All this experience is missing from index cards with QR codes. You could get the same kind of experience from vinyl, but that would cost a lot more and the sound quality won't be as good.