As technology develops, music is getting easier and easier to obtain, whether someone simply streams it on Spotify or has their entire music library on iTunes. The age of owning a physical copy of music is declining, but is that a good or bad thing? Buying digital music versus physical music can be a hard decision and there are pros and cons for either option.

Digital music by far is obviously much easier to purchase than physical music. It’s simply a few clicks of a mouse, and the song is sitting nicely in your iTunes or Amazon library, ready to go. The quality is usually very good with audio files from reputable outlets, and you can put it on your phone, your laptop or your iPod (for those who still have one). If you buy exclusively digital, all of your music is conveniently located in one place. However, digital music isn’t handy in all situations. For example, if a car doesn’t have an AUX port or an AUX cable, looks like the radio is the only option, and for those long car rides, it can feel similar to torture when you can’t listen to your favorite music. If your device is out of battery, it’s even worse. Plus, digital music can occasionally be more expensive if you are buying single songs off an album rather than the entire tracklist. All of this music can be hard to sort through—sometimes having 20,000 songs in the same place isn’t a good thing. Perhaps one of the biggest issues of digital music is the availability of illegal downloads. Musicians lose out on money when someone downloads a song illegally, and it just isn’t fair to the artist who worked so hard on their music. Buying a physical copy from a legitimate music store ensures that the buyer is supporting the artist.

Not as many people are buying CDs, vinyl or cassettes anymore (even though the hipster lot seems to love vinyl and cassettes), but owning physical copies of music has many benefits. First off, you can listen to music in any car easily, which may not seem like such a big deal until it’s the third hour listening to one song for every five radio commercials on your way to the mountains. Also, when you buy an album, you get to see album art, which can often set the tone for what the music is actually going to be like. Plus, there’s a romantic aspect of putting a vinyl on a record player and listening to an album’s songs in consecutive order. It may seem cheesy, but hearing the crackle of a beat-up Rolling Stones vinyl is something special. Older forms of physical music are making a comeback—Urban Outfitters even just recently announced they would start selling cassettes. However, older forms of music can be a negative—with some physical copies, you lose quality of the sound. Another positive to physical copies of music is that the music isn’t all in one location—it’s spread out over multiple CDs and vinyl, and it can be a hassle to change out music if you only wanted to hear one song off an album and one off another.

Those are only a few pros and cons to a hard decision, but keep them in mind next time you go out to buy new music.