If you’ve been to a charity shop recently, you’ve probably seen the CD section, full of now unloved early 2000s music on sale for £1. If you’re like me, you also bought every decent album they had for your own shelves. Maybe you think this is mad, because we all use Spotify & Apple Music now, or vinyl if you’re a proper hipster.
The hipsters are right, though. Less about vinyl, it’s far too inconvenient a format for me to be interested in it, but about actually owning your music collection. Streaming is great, I stream music every day, but none of that music is yours. If you can’t afford your subscription one month, the service shuts down or your favourite artist removes their music from the platform, then no music for you. We’ve become quite used to subscriptions and cloud services, but even though they’re often convenient, they’re not always better than the old solution in every way. I like being able to choose music on-demand and check out new artists without committing to a purchase, but if I can listen to any music, any time, anywhere, what makes it special?
If you were born in the 90s or earlier, you probably remember when music was only ever on a CD, and if you do remember that, you probably remember listening to your CDs over and over again, just like I did. You didn’t get new ones all the time, and that made them important. The songs were precious and albums you loved would constantly be in your stereo. The cases would be worn & cracked from being opened, closed and dropped frequently. I guarantee you never feel this connected to an album on a streaming service, because it’s hard to feel truly connected to something that’s never physically in your hand.
But a lot of this can be said about vinyl, so what’s good about CDs? Well, firstly, they are a lot cheaper than vinyl, partly because they’re unfashionable, but also because they don’t require expensive equipment to enjoy them. Cheap record players can damage vinyl & don’t sound good, but cheap CD players are basically fine for general use. Digital audio is much easier & cheaper to manufacture equipment for because it’s all just circuitry to read a fixed, digital code. Fully analogue equipment has to be carefully tuned and is much more expensive to make well. You can pick up a USB CD drive for your computer for about £20, or even a cool Discman-like portable player for £25. It’s entry level, sure, but no way can you enjoy listening to an LP on new equipment for that little. I managed to find an awesome Sony S-Master 3 disc changer stereo from 2007 on eBay for about £60, and it puts every other music player I own to shame.
Cost aside – though cost really does matter – CDs are also convenient. Cassette tapes (which might get their own revival it seems – nostalgia is powerful!) replaced vinyl because they offered portability – Sony’s Walkman had a big part to play here – and durability. CDs replaced cassettes because they did all that, plus could hold an immense amount of data – that meant more music at a much better quality. There were other features too, like track skipping! Vinyl takes up a lot of space and is the opposite of convenient, but CDs strike a lovely balance between the convenience of streaming and the physicality & quality of vinyl. I can have a collection of many dozens of albums in a tiny space, but I still get to own my music, see the album covers and peruse my collection when I want to put something on.
Whether CD or vinyl sounds better is up to you, and probably depends on how much you spent on your record player, but a CD with a decent master is going to be more than perfect for any audio system you’re likely to own, and much better than streaming. This isn’t a pitch to audiophiles, it’s a pitch to people who like music.
So my request is for CDs not to die. To make this happen, people still need to buy them occasionally. Next time your favourite artist brings a new album out, buy it on disc – it’ll cost you about a tenner, which isn’t a huge ask. Listen to it in full at home, and I guarantee you’ll feel an appreciation for that album you wouldn’t get on your AirPods via Apple Music. Physical things still matter, and you shouldn’t always rely on the internet to listen to music.
Oliver Douglas 