As a kid, I remember buying new LPs and while they were playing, I settled down with the cover, read the liner notes, looked over the lyrics and gazed at the nice 12" x 12" artwork, which hopefully added to the overall experience. I liked gatefold covers even more. In doing this, I became familiar with the song titles, and as I was reading the cover while listening to the LP, the names stuck. Unless they were Zeppelin tracks - their titles never made any sense.
Then came CDs. The artwork was less impressive, the fonts used for lyrics and credits were often impossibly small, particularly in a dark room (some of the CD cover artists should have been beaten with a stick).
WTF. I'm supposed to use a lupe?
Then came downloads. No cover. No nothing. Song titles are replaced with "Track 5." I don't want to stare at an iPod screen. And if you stream audio around the house from a central server, you never get to see the song titles.
I thought it was just my grumpy self, but recently I've noticed that it isn't. More and more, I hear references to songs off an album such as "that verse on track 4 , or is it 5?" or "there's a song on the new XYZ record that you should hear - it's in the middle - maybe track 6."
Thinking about all the songs I have in my iTunes library from the past few years, I probably can actually name less than 5%. I have to hunt for them to figure out what I want to hear, auditioning the first few bars.
Technology isn't always a step forward.