To me, the essence of music is performance, live performance, and connection between people. All the artifacts like vinyl, tapes and CD are substitutes for the original performance. The loss of material contact that comes with digital is indeed the second loss, after having lost the original performance. Though, one way to look at it is that the loss of the substitute can instead enable a more direct connection with the original performance, by moving the focus away from the substitute.
There's been great album art though, and some artists have reached a greater sense of achievement by putting some of their focus on album art... but this is not music...
