How important were album covers in your purchases?

As for blank tapes, they continued to sell loooooong after cassettes themselves had lost their market. We all, I’m sure, had hundreds of blank tapes from the cassette era - of albums copied from friends, and recorded from the radio, etc. But even after people stopped buying cassettes, and started buying CDs, there were still quite a few years where blank tapes were still bought - only now it was to copy not just albums from friends, but our own albums on CDs. Because early portable CD players were stupidly expensive, and prone to skipping; and very few cars had CD players unless one was specially installed - again with early models being very expensive and prone to skipping. It would be some time before anti-jogging technology had advanced, and car CD players were common enough, that the blank tape market would dry up - even while it was almost impossible to buy a new album on cassette!

But for those of us who lived in a time before the accessibility and availability of the internet, it was a very different world. Some record stores did have listening posts, but by no means all. And even those that had listening posts did not always offer a choice of what to listen to. So sometimes one might buy something without hearing anything on it prior, or maybe having heard only one song from it elsewhere giving an indication of how the album might sound (which was often found afterwards to be not particularly representative of the whole).