A scratched record can preserve an interruption that becomes part of someone’s memory of the song.

Damage sometimes gets absorbed into a thing rather than ruining it. If you grew up with a particular jump in a particular track, the clean version sounds wrong, because what you learned was the record you actually had rather than the one that was released. Flaws that repeat become features of the memory, and familiarity is stronger than fidelity.

Notice which imperfect versions of things you prefer, and let yourself keep them. Be slower to correct somebody else’s remembered version too. The scratch may be doing more work in their memory than a perfect copy could.