Certainly it has been good news for the 2015 behemoth “Hamilton,” whose recording now stands at No. 16 on the Billboard 200 chart, even after 93 weeks. This is astounding because the ranking, which takes into account sales, radio play and online streaming, covers all music genres. From the more recently ended season, only “Dear Evan Hansen” has charted as consistently. It is just the fourth cast album — after “Hamilton,” “The Book of Mormon” and “Hair” — to crack the top 10 in the past 50 years.

But then “Hamilton” and “Dear Evan Hansen” are great musicals and great hits (and their albums were in fact released by major labels). They would have been successful, artistically and financially, even in the days of vinyl. On the other hand, the cast album of “Paramour,” with songs that seem to have been written by a monkey with a Casio keyboard and a random cliché generator, is good news only for Luddites. It argues for the days when far less was recorded.

What about the rest of the pack? What do cast albums tell us about the state of the art, and what do they tell us about the shows they are based on? Mr. Minchin’s challenge forced me to consider not only how his songs for “Groundhog Day” sounded after repeat exposure but also how listening to them in a nontheatrical context altered their texture.

Among other things, I realized that a lot of the rhymes I hadn’t liked onstage seemed harmless when I no longer needed to get information from them. But I still feel, and songwriters I spoke to agreed, that a show with such satirical heft would have benefited from the clean ping of exactly matched sounds.

On the other hand, the songs whose musical structure I’d found “baggy” now seemed more compelling than they did in the theater, where the intensity of the action interfered with their reception. Relistening also enhanced my appreciation for “Playing Nancy” and “Night Will Come,” two songs I already liked. Onstage, sung by characters who were otherwise peripheral, they seemed dramatically unmoored. Listened to in the context of no context, they shone far brighter, if alone.