Which is why some people are greeting the digital revolution in music with a touch of nostalgia. Not so long ago, buying an album typically meant going down to the record store, looking over the goods, maybe discussing them with sales clerks or other customers.

Now, iPods are everywhere. Buying new music is as easy as pointing and clicking. Even as many rock fans agree that that's a good thing for music, some mourn the passing of the Age of the Album — and others shrug that, that's long gone, anyway.

Ryan Williams is on board the iTunes bandwagon, but a little reluctantly. Five or six times a month, Williams, 30, downloads a single or two off the Web. But he's still a "record geek," he says.

"I think you're losing a little bit," says Williams, a multimedia development specialist at Indiana University School of Dentistry. "The iPod, and digital music in general, really gives the listener control over music. It takes away a lot of stuff we're familiar with — going to record stores, holding the album. There's something lost there when you don't have the liner notes."

Or jacket art, which can become etched in the mind as indelibly as the music inside — it's hard to forget that big smiling mouth on the "Rufus featuring Chaka Khan" album cover. Or even a song sequence chosen by the artist.

The album hasn't disappeared, of course. Though downloads have shot way up in recent years, so far, they seem to be supplementing album sales, not replacing them.

"At this point, there's still obviously a place for physical music in the market, and there will be for the foreseeable future," says Isaac Josephson, who tracks music sales trends for the NPD Group, a market research firm based in Port Washington, N.Y. "People are using digital music more as a tool to sample."

But sales of "physical music," if not disappearing, have been stagnating. Americans spent $8.98 billion on CDs in 2004, down from $9.9 billion in 2002, according to the NPD Group.

Meanwhile, the number of people turning to iTunes and similar sites has more than doubled in the past year. Between March 2004 and March 2005, the number of households downloading music jumped from 1 million to 2.4 million, according to the NPD Group.

For some people, MP3s will never be the same as albums. Warren Zanes, a vice president at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland, has fond memories of spinning such albums as the Stones' "Exile on Main Street."

"It was almost like you'd put the record on and you'd watch the album cover," says Zanes. "It's so odd to see someone looking at a still image the way people looked at album covers."

Some people still do. Dave Britts, a sales clerk at Missing Link Records in Indianapolis, is surrounded by music the way he loves it — on vinyl.