Back when vinyl ruled the earth I'd record cassettes for use in the car. But I tended to change the order of the tracks and it used to drive my friends insane.
When playing vinyl at home one side would be played all the way but generally it'd get switched to another album when it was time to flip the record over. I was up anyway so why not change things up?
CD's made listening to favorite cuts pretty painless.
Digital music servers make pulling favorites even less painless. It's easier to do a hop, skip and jump and it does get in the way of continuous listening. Now it takes the right album or artist to keep playing the whole album.
I find the local audio folks who have just gotten digital music servers to be the worst. They'll start something and won't even let the song play through without jumping to something else. Yeah, I do it too but not when guests are over as it's pretty annoying.