8 ms·

CD sales growth outpaced vinyl in the first half of 2026

194 points by speckx 4mo ago

geekamongus 4mo ago
Good! As a vinyl collector, the price has gotten way too high. Let this help drive it down.
- aduty 4mo ago
  This won't affect the price of vinyl. Most CD buyers just don't want a bunch of lawyers ruining their collection as happens on the different services from time to time. Ripping a CD to mp3s and sticking them on a thumb drive is easier than with vinyl, but vinyl has its own tactile experience. The types of nostalgia are not the same. Which is really unfortunate since I would also like more affordable vinyl records.
  - criddell 4mo ago
    The tactile experience is one thing, but if you are bothered by the heavy use of compression on CDs (the loudness wars), then vinyl might sound better to you. Now that people aren't listening to CDs in the car, it would be amazing to see some remasters of CDs with the dynamic compression dialed back a bit.
    - BoingBoomTschak 4mo ago
      You seem to be stating a general rule when this concerns only a very small amount of cases (not the loudness war itself, but when the vinyl uses a different and drastically better master) that's also quite dependent on genre. And omit that a lot of music sounds a lot worse on vinyl due to its lack of dynamic range and poor LF capabilities (classical, electronic). This isn't for nothing that the first recording pressed on CD was a rendition of the Alpensinfonie.
      - criddell 4mo ago
        > You seem to be stating a general rule I was trying not to. I thought saying "it might sound better to you" would make it clear that it's a subjective matter of taste.
        BoingBoomTschak 4mo ago
        I meant "general" with regards to the material, not the listener. I have myself digitized a few rare cases like Celtic Frost's Monotheist because the CD was horrid and I know pop and rock suffered much more from the phenomenon, but unless the music was released first as a vinyl then got later butchered on CD (so before '85~88), it's very rare to have a situation where the vinyl is objectively better. One such case I encountered was Unknown Pleasures (https://world-playground-deceit.net/blog/2025/11/music-review-joy-division-unknown-pleasures-1979-.html https://world-playground-deceit.net/blog/2025/11/music-revie...) but I finally found a CD worth the change. Kraftwerk and Depeche Mode were also bands that gave me much trouble when navigating their haphazard CD master landscape.
    - mypalmike 4mo ago
      This type of remastering (and remixing) has been happening for a while now. Lots of newer releases of classic albums of the CD era have remasters with less compression. Pretty Hate Machine, American Idiot, Absolution (Muse)…
      - jonhohle 4mo ago
        PHM was released before the loudness war. I’ve actually read the opposite about the 2010 remaster. Significantly more compression making all the layers (one of the hallmarks of NIN) inaudible. I’ve listened to the 2010 version, but never felt anything wrong with the original. Fortunately, the original is extremely easy to find and usually very cheap, for comparison.
        mypalmike 4mo ago
        True, PHM was not the best example.
  - threetonesun 4mo ago
    Vinyl is just more cumbersome to make and ship and store, there's no way the price goes down. As someone who only likes vinyl for the art size I'd almost wish CD longboxes or something similar would come back.
    - helterskelter 4mo ago
      Most (all?) new vinyls these days were originally digital files anyways. I like the big album covers though, and the ritual of turning them over in the middle.
      - l72 4mo ago
        I like vinyl (any physical media, i still listen to new bands that only release on cassette) because it is cumbersome and purposeful. You have to flip through a collection and make a conscious decision on what to listen to. You don’t get to just skip skip skip so you tend to pay attention and listen to the full album. I get the convenience of streaming and love it when I’m on the go or need background music, but it is a totally different experience.
      - maccard 4mo ago
        I had my album printed on vinyl a while back. We had very specific instructions on how to prepare it, but it was effectively two files, one for side A and one for side B, and we were told the padding margins for start/end to leave. All vinyl has likely passed through some digital format for the last 45 years. We mastered specifically for vinyl as a format though, the difference between the spotify masters and the vinyl masters is quite significant.
mrguyorama 4mo ago
I have subscribed to Spotify since before 2012. I enjoyed finding new music and the convenience of listening to anything, whenever. My consumption habits are not very amenable to buying CDs, because I have no idea ahead of time which songs will "Hit" for me. I generally don't like "Artists" or "Genres" and I enjoy listening to wildly different music from day to day. However, I have watched Spotify destroy my playlists regularly, and now it seems to happen more than once a year! Songs that they still have a license for and still have on their platform will be removed from your playlist and marked "Unavailable" because some licensing agreement change meant the actual file and unique ID in their system has changed, and they make zero effort to resolve the damage this regularly does to my library and playlists. It makes staying on the spotify platform, the spotify "ecosystem" as it were, utterly worthless. No playlist you make today can be expected to be usable in the future. Any effort you put in to organize and find stuff is for naught. Meanwhile, my shitty folder full of mp3 rips from sketchy sources from highschool has stayed with me, and works perfectly. It's getting hard to justify now. None of the money I pay even goes to the people I listen to, because they are primarily niche and indie groups. Spotify seems to be doing this on purpose, and a close friend of people high up in Spotify is running a business to generate AI music so that spotify can fill up their generated playlists with slop that they don't have to pay anyone for, and which dilutes the rev share for real humans.
- teepo 4mo ago
  I wonder if that is what itunes match protects against? I've paid for that service for a long time, but at this point not certain it has any value.
Rooster61 4mo ago
While I'm thrilled that kids are experiencing the thrill of buying physical media, I'm not sure CD's are the best way to go. Most of my CD's from my teenage years are no longer playable (partially due to poor upkeep, but some literally from disc rot). But hey, they'll learn the same lesson in a couple of decades haha. I've personally been buying vinyl both because of the fact I missed out on the excitement myself growing up, and because I have some records that came out decades before I was born that play like the day they were minted. They've outlasted pretty much all of my CD's.
- nubinetwork 4mo ago
  I've noticed that pressed discs work better than burned discs, but thats what backups are for... assuming you can get a working original that is...
  - l72 4mo ago
    Yeah burned discs wore out much earlier but it depended a lot on the brand. Fry’s great quality brand (or whatever it was called) did not last long. But my memorex and verbatim still work fine after 30 years of mistreatment!
- mrob 4mo ago
  I have hundreds of CDs from the 80s and 90s, most of them bought used from charity shops. The vast majority play perfectly, despite some of them having obvious signs of poor storage/handling. I think it's more likely your CD player is failing than your CDs.
  - deleted 4mo ago
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  - criddell 4mo ago
    I had some CDs that I couldn't get an accurate rip from so I took them to a used games store and they polished them for $1 each and all but one I was able to rip them all perfectly. I think the one that continued to fail must have had a flaw on the label side.
adamm255 4mo ago
The Jumanji “What year is it” meme 100% applies here.
honeycrispy 4mo ago
I built a computer last year and made sure it had a blu-ray drive in it. There are very few cases that have built-in CD bays any more.
- ColdStream 4mo ago
  My PC case has a complete flat front, very much regret that choice.
  - abanana 4mo ago
    Yep, seems they pretty much all do! I couldn't find a sensible case last year when putting together a new PC for my brother, who wanted it to include a CD/DVD drive. (He regularly buys CDs at 10 for £1, listens for a bit then sells them for a lot more on eBay - the demand is there.) I ended up reusing the case from an old computer of my own. I'm sure on my own next upgrade, I'll continue to stick with my existing 20-year-old case, for the same reason. And the drives themselves are 2-3 times the price they were at the peak of their demand (makes sense, they're almost a niche product these days).
    - criddell 4mo ago
      I've been looking for a retro-style case. There are companies that make cases that look like 90's towers (Silverstone), but I'm hoping to find something more like a PS/2 Model 30 (or any PS/2 - so many beautiful designs) or Amiga 1000. Something I can put under my monitor.
tangenter 4mo ago
Personally, I haven’t stopped buying CDs or in certain cases DVDs and Blu-Rays - not of movies but of music. I find it interesting these “went away” but I can see why: nobody I know has a cd player to begin with. A lot of laptops nowadays don’t come with disc trays, and nobody buys a dvd bluray player. Yes, the PS or Xbox can play it but everyone just streams movies or music. So somewhere along the way it disappeared and I doubt it will genuinely come back. It’s a needless headache.
- ColdStream 4mo ago
  The one thing I hope happens with a revival of CDs/DVDs is that hopefully we get a new generation of players. I still buy movies on DVD but the players are a bit hit and miss. That said, I do frequently see Sony bluray players in second hand stores for a few dollars and that is how I have my collection of players, but that is not a sustainable system. I just wish my PC case had a slot for the drive bay, that was a foolish choice on my behalf.
  - tangenter 4mo ago
    I have a pile of my own so I know what you are talking about. I love how even today DVD and Blu Ray players look, long after they were released. They are compact and chic, looking a tad futuristic but not at all the sort of stuff that screams attention-seeking, gaudy design. The kind that you could put unassumingly on a shelf next to a pile of books and wouldn’t even know it’s there without a closer look, or take up to a cottage and leave with a pile of old movies to watch on a dark, gloomy day, like in the old days. One looks at, say, LLMs nowadays and is amazed but, to me personally, we haven’t stopped living in the future for a very long time now. This message was typed on a device with a touch screen no larger than my hand.
  - deleted 4mo ago
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- sublinear 4mo ago
  I think this is a bit more complicated than that. There's more music and video being made today than ever before and social media is how it gets distributed. Attentive time spent on streaming platforms is completely dwarfed by social media. If at all, people have something streaming in the background while they barely pay attention to it and instead focus on their phones. This aligns with the broader historical trends of the internet creating deep niches. You have to take the good with the bad. We wouldn't even be discussing physical media at all without the internet being how it is. Despite there being a large audience for physical media, they're not the majority. The majority has moved on.
needSomeCoffee 4mo ago
Buy. Rip. Own forever. Compensate artists fairly. My prefered method.
helterskelter 4mo ago
Kids these days want CD's, ipods and the original apple headphones. They call it "retro".
- alephnerd 4mo ago
  Becuase it is retro. The 1990s and 2000s were a generation ago.
- danshipt 4mo ago
  I think it’s because they are more convenient: CDs are cheap, you own your music. With iPods you save hundreds of dollars per year, and you get to keep your music (and the iPod shuffle is perfect for working out).
l72 4mo ago
A friend in his 40s had a 90s birthday party so I burned some mix CDs as party favors. Those CDrs were 20 years old and have been sitting in a hot, humid attic for the last 10+ years, but still recorded fine. The real problem was almost no one had a CD player not even in their car! Also, I don’t think k3b or any of the other software i tried has been updated since 2005, but it all still worked great! Most importantly, one of my friends brought it home and his 8 year old was so intrigued by it she came over and we burned a bunch of mix cds for her and her friends! I have no idea if her friends had anyway to play them, but she enjoyed making hand made cover art for each friend. When I was in the attic looking for blank cds I came across a few other spindles of burned cds. Both mixes from my formative years and a bunch my wife had kept. Those times were magical and I few like kids have missed out.
- justsomehnguy 4mo ago
  Hah! Last year I bought a USB DVD RW drive just for the sake of it. My 5.25" NEC 4xxx (with LightScribe) just quietly died in a PC used daily after around ~5 years of an extremely low usage. My only other ODD was in ThinkPad X301 and I had a feeling it would just die someday too most - and I would know it only when I would need read something. So I just somewhat future-proofed myself a bit. Number of discs I read on that drive is below 10 I think. EDIT: oh, I helped out a friend to transfer some MRI records from a CDR with that drive. Somehow it was easier to send them from the other side of the country to a friend who would ask me to copy it and to send them back electronically.
  - dieselgate 4mo ago
    I purchased a DVD player for the first time this past weekend.
    - ColdStream 4mo ago
      It's the funniest thing with DVD and older consoles for that matter. For the first few minutes you can really sense the lower resolution but once you adjust it is perfectly fine. I am actually impressed with how well the image quality on some DVD's are considering it is a 30 year old format. Compare it to the likes of Bink or Sorenson codecs of the time and it looks amazing. Although I think a big part of that is just throwing stacks of bandwidth at the problem.
diego_moita 4mo ago
Playing a physical CD is a bit like going to a movie theatre instead of Netflix. It is a ceremony, a ritual, a physical engagement of respect for the artists that created the work. You don't do that to discardable music, the kind of crap they play on shopping malls, gyms, supermarkets and elevators. You do it to what you recognize as art and worth attention and care.
cdrnsf 4mo ago
Buy CDs, buy vinyl, buy merch, go see shows — support artists instead of platforms and middlemen wherever you can. This is a welcome trend.
- arthurjj 4mo ago
  I try to buy as many shirts as possible from bands I like and this post reminded me to go look again. I listen to a lot of metal and punk and the problem is most the shirts are either black, which overheat you in SoCal, or have designs that are aggressively ugly [1]. I wish more bands hired better designers or at least had shirts I wouldn't overheat in [1] I own and wear this one so it's not always a deal breaker https://merchbar.imgix.net/product/174/7292/6127313518766/Zsk4ONDQpinkwhiteBrokenWorldTee.jpg?quality=60&auto=compress,format&w=1200&h=630 https://merchbar.imgix.net/product/174/7292/6127313518766/Zs...
  - cdrnsf 4mo ago
    I have a ton of shirts, but have been sticking to buy limited edition ones or from bands at shows lately. I live in SoCal (north of LA) and end up suffering in the heat. Nothing did some non-black ones for their new album at least https://bandofnothing.shop/collections/apparel/products/essential-tremors-t-shirt https://bandofnothing.shop/collections/apparel/products/esse...
- dylan604 4mo ago
  There's a couple of artists that I would absolutely buy their vinyl except the shipping is more expensive than the vinyl. I've done it a couple of times for artists I really like and appreciate, but it is most definitely cost prohibitive. So it's pay their bandcamp prices for the digitals and streaming, but the physical media is just made in too limited quantities to be affordable by anyone but FAANG employees
  - cdrnsf 4mo ago
    Shipping on vinyl is rough — even shirts from anywhere outside of the US have tipped towards being hard to justify with shipping and all. I'll usually go for Bandcamp in that case (or buy something licensed in the US in the hopes that the license fee is at least something).
ColdStream 4mo ago
About 10 years back I figured that this was coming. CDs are the best of both worlds. Near perfect audio quality, not too big physically, cannot have the rights revoked, no subscription fees but really easy to rip and put on your phone or whatever. A few years back I saw some people buying collections of thousands of discs for maybe $100. Even if 10% of it was good, that was still a huge win. Those huge hauls are becoming rare now as they have been picked clean. If only Minidisc had better audio quality, it would have REALLY been the perfect medium.
- CamelCaseName 4mo ago
  There are people who do this at scale, often reselling online. It's definitely for those who are truly passionate about it, and enjoy discovering new things. I gave it a shot, and while profitable, just not for me at all.
- jeroenhd 4mo ago
  slotMusic/slotRadio has tried to sell music through SD cards. They never took off, but a full SD card would probably be the best balance in terms of reliability, size, and capacity in my opinion. Plus, a surprising amount of media devices still carry SD card readers. Flash storage developments came too late, but the spinning disks and risk of physical damage to the plastic are an annoying risk to have to deal with. Even Minidisc still required some form of physical motion.
bloomca 4mo ago
I have a sizeable collection of CDs and during last year wrote my own CD reader and a ripper CLI. As ridiculous as it sounds, but there is some intent in doing all of that and listening to the files on your hard drive. We have a vynil/CD player as well, but they are not at my workplace.
robotburrito 4mo ago
I recently bought an external cdrom for my laptop. The library here has a wonderful cd collection.
mintflow 4mo ago
recently I bought my 8 years old a cheap new cassette player as a birthday gift which I want to get when I was child Turned out he really love it and I also bought more cassetee as requested from him, and the cost of those cassetee seem surpass the player itself What I find the child seems feel more real if the music play from some gears instead of digital ones, and he know well how to use and find a track in the middle I also want to buy a new cd player which is also I want when I was youth... Maybe people are just tired of the streaming and I also find that there seems to be a surge of new album and music in youtube music now, the album's cover seems being generated by AI, and maybe also the music itself is generated by AI
maingame 4mo ago
In foro interno The internal forum. https://rateyourmusic.com/artist/noise https://rateyourmusic.com/artist/noise
msftgreed 4mo ago
> CD sales surged 16% to 16.3 million units, soundly outpacing vinyl’s comparatively modest 2.4% growth. Ok, but the lack of a unit on vinyl makes it very hard to have an apples to apples comparison here. If cds are selling 1000 units and vinyl is selling 1,000,000 units, those 16% and 2.4% numbers are pretty wildly different things. Also, the huge increase is primarily driven by KPOP (in particular, BTS). CD sales growth was like 6% without them. I don't know that we can draw a conclusion from that 16% except BTS can move physical media.
- adzm 4mo ago
  Re BTS, really it's just because there is a CD included in the box with all the other stuff you get when you buy the album. My daughter thought it was neat; that's when I realized I don't even have a CD player anywhere. I doubt many people are actually using these CDs
- voncheese 4mo ago
  Yeah came here to say the same thing on the lack of absolute units. Speaking as an older vinyl collector myself, with kids who have also gotten into it...it would surprise me if the total unit numbers were even within 2 orders of magnitude. Vinyl just feels different. The feeling of holding the cardboard cover and the weight of the album on a turntable can't be replicated at all with CDs.
herrh 4mo ago
In order to make my kids (2 and 4) be able to play music on their own without having to use a smart device or screen i bought an old boombox for like 10 dollars a couple of years ago. We buy a lot of records, though exclusively in goodwill-like stores, and they love it. They have a lot of audiobooks for kids but also cd:s with music. A favourite right now is Aquas debut album Aquarium (the one with Barbie Girl) I think it is really nice for kids to get something physical they can look for themselves in stores and find music that they think looks interesting rather than just what the algorithm would give them were they to use screens (They watch some tv though). But they also seem to love just looking in the booklets and the pictures of the artists or they characters from the books. But it also gives them more freedom to just put on a record if they want rather than having to ask me to put something on our Google Nest. Vinyl records are still too hard to put on and there isn't that much good kids stuff you can find and cassettes are so easy to accidentely tangle. They are still not that good at handling the cd records so they get smudged and jacks and stuff, but i'm looking into buying a CD-R writer so i can easily make new copies of the cd:s that stutter and won't play.
- iamben 4mo ago
  One of my absolute favourite things as an impressionable teen getting into music was reading through the liner notes in the CD booklets. You'd read the lyrics, see some pictures, and best you'd scour through the thank you section and those would be the bands you'd look for next time you were in the record shop. Great times.
  - DoesntMatter22 4mo ago
    The pictures. They told a thousand words. I loved those times. Made me think about what the artist was thinking. 90s had some great CD and cassette booklets
- gyulai 4mo ago
  I've been on a journey to rediscover cassettes as a medium this year, both for myself and my kid. For myself, the motivation was ownership over streaming and wanting to support the long tail of artists (or, anyways, the subset whose music I happen to like). For my kid, my motivation looks just like yours: not wanting to give him access to smart devices and wanting to keep him away from screens. The big learning was that, almost inevitably, one has to divorce the medium used for purchase from the medium used for consumption (which eliminates vinyl from consideration right there). When I started actually buying cassettes from artists on BandCamp, I quickly realized that I was paying way more for shipping costs and customs duties than for the actual media. Artists often offer the cassette including the digital album on BandCamp at similar prices to just the digital. Makes sense, if you consider that the digital doesn't add any real marginal cost. But, once you factor in the cost of tape stock, production, packaging/handling, often done by the artists themselves, I almost feel bad about taking advantage of their generosity. My intention is to financially support them, but I'm finding it hard to believe that, on the other end of all of these costs, there is any money left over for them. ...so, I tended to use the BandCamp feature for tipping/overpaying, but too much of that got eaten up by taxes and my collector / music enjoyment hobby just became too expensive over all, that way. So, I stopped buying physical. My plan is to set up some kind of system to help me stay organized with self-hosted music files, and then re-booting my collecting hobby by buying one-time digital downloads on BandCamp Fridays or directly from artists. Maybe, I will also make mix tapes from time to time for myself or to give to other people. -- I think, in this context, the degrading-quality of analogue is a feature not a bug, because the ideal outcome would be for friends to enjoy single tracks from albums in degraded quality from the mix tapes, and then look up the artists they like and buy full albums as high-quality digital downloads, and support the artists that way. For the kid, I got a vintage Fisher Price cassette player, and am finding it hard to believe that anything based on CDs could match the sturdy build quality. Also, with a toddler, it's a given that the media will be in contact with the floor a lot and scratch. So, this is another area where the cassette is a clear winner. The third learning is about the actual process of making the cassettes: Right now, I have a tablet connected to a vintage tape deck through an analogue cable, and that's a surprisingly low-friction way to turn any kind of content that you can actually play into a cassette. Trying to stay within the digital realm to burn a CD means fighting the DRM platforms of each channel you're sourcing content through separately (with each presenting a moving target through time). That can get quite exhausting. I guess, if quality is not so much of a concern (which, with cassettes you're throwing out the window from the get-go), one can always use some kind of a screen-recording tool to record desktop audio, so, maybe, this is not a fair comparison. Fourth, cassettes are easy to recycle: If I have a mixtape that I no longer listen to, or my kid outgrows a given piece of content, I can just record over it. I can buy boxes full of old cassettes as attic-finds on e-bay dirt-cheap, and get some use out of that stuff. This seems more environmentally friendly and sustainable than paying an industry to keep producing something that will inevitably be garbage one day. Maybe CD-RWs present a similar opportunity; not sure (never really looked into it much). I also buy some new tape stock from Recording The Masters, though, because I dig what they're doing, and want to support them. So, regarding that whole trend of bringing back physical media, my pick is the cassette.
karlkloss 4mo ago
Vinyl records were a pain in the back, tapes were a pain in the back, CDs were a pain in the back. I still remember the day when mp3 became publicly available. I immediately started ripping and converting everything, and never looked back. Nowadays, I can buy a $3 microcontroller board and make it play mp3's. And it'll outlive most CDs that are pressed today, so what?
gregjw 4mo ago
its happening
ErneX 4mo ago
Most of the vinyls I buy are used.
pjmlp 4mo ago
I stop buying vinyl still during the early 90's, but I surely do buy CDs to this day. In some case I do buy MP3 directly from online stores, if not available as CD, and burn the CD as well. Never had a Spotify account, nor plan to.
jillesvangurp 4mo ago
I grew up in the eighties. Tapes, records, cds, etc. I've seen it all. I haven't used a device that can play any of these in over two decades. I have more music at my fingertips in Spotify than I ever had on these. Love it. I was a teenager in a small provincial town in the Netherlands. It had two record stores. They were small. There was also the library with a small collection of decent cds that you could "borrow" (copy to tape). If it wasn't on the radio or in those stores, or in the library, I had no access to it. That was how I built my music collection. Buying albums properly was expensive. I only had about 10 or so. I had a few dozen tapes. Maybe 60 Albums or so and some mix tapes. That was it. Compared to what I have on Spotify, that's nothing. There's all this BS. how everything was better on "hifi" equipment of the 1980s. The reality of course was that most poor teenagers did not have access to either decent equipment or decent music. I tracked down most of what I had in physical form on Spotify ages ago. And I even listen to some of it regularly. Sounds great with decent modern headphones. I'm perfectly happy with my Sennheiser bluetooth headphones. It probably sounds infinitely better than what I had back in the day. I alsp have a much wider selection of music. Anything I want really. And of course I'm now in my fifties and my hearing isn't what it used to be in terms of high frequencies. I'm about average in hearing loss (i.e. not going deaf) but any absurdly priced headphones would probably be wasted on me. That's the irony of aging audiophiles, right when they can afford all the right gear, their hearing starts deteriorating. You can't compensate for that with gold plated plugs or any of the other nonsense people are into. Records and analog amplifiers sound nice mainly because of the sound distortion and compression. This isn't all that hard to emulate with digital processing. The pop music of the nineteen eighties was optimized for the cheap FM radios that most people had. That's why a lot of albums got remastered later. The original sound is not actually all that great on modern equipment.
HackerThemAll 4mo ago
Sorry but vinyls don't offer anything but nostalgia for "old, good times", and approach to the audiophile crowd of insane people. I don't buy into these crackles. I stopped using MP3. A high quality OPUS file format is the way to go for me. I can take the whole music library in my pocket to the places with no internet, listen through good enough in-ear headphones, or with a small speaker (if for more people), and charge that stuff with a small foldable solar panel on the go, next to the tent. Try this with your gramophone. YMMV.
- defrost 4mo ago
  > Sorry but vinyls don't offer anything but nostalgia That's simply incorrect on the face of it, as others have pointed out vinyls offers a curated physical object per clump of music tracks. Maybe that's not for you, which is fine; but for a number of people, young people today and older people that grew up with records that's a different way of engaging with the media and the artists presentation of media than a faceless, artless, beige device on shuffle. A large physical album cover with artwork, lyrics, details, etc. is something that some people just like - and was liked even in the days when there was no nostalgia attached to the packaging. Yoto has a market for children because it has a device driven by physical cards. ~ https://yotoplay.com/ https://yotoplay.com/ Yeah, I've got an original metal tin from a 1968 purchase as a child: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogdens%27_Nut_Gone_Flake#Design_and_packaging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogdens%27_Nut_Gone_Flake#Desig...
- intrikate 4mo ago
  I mean, I could take an amplifier, my speakers and my turntable all with a big battery station anywhere I want to play records. Less convenient, sure, but "I can take it with me!" is not the win you expect here, haha.
- nephihaha 4mo ago
  The best thing about vinyl is the covers. The artwork and sleeve notes look great due to the size. Cassettes and CDs don't work as well that way.
thenthenthen 4mo ago
Next up: MiniDisc!
- nephihaha 4mo ago
  MiniDisc never took off in some parts of the world, so little real nostalgia in those places.
  - thenthenthen 4mo ago
    Its so funny, after this vinyl revival a couple of years ago (well…10-15?) I jokingly told my friends CD’s would be next, I even produced some CD player prototypes in anticipation (sadly all the transports I got were mostly faulty+dead lasers and I shelved the project…maybe I should pick it back up again?)
    - nephihaha 4mo ago
      There was the cassette thing a few years ago. Cassettes were good in that you could drop them on the ground and they would be okay. Not so gold when they got tangled. I don't think vinyl ever fully went out of fashion.
basisword 4mo ago
I recently started buying CD's again (also have bought vinyl for a couple of decades now). Something it made me realise is that we've lost the 'gift' of music. Giving/receiving CD's as gifts was always a joy. Copying CD's for friends too if you thought they might like it. With streaming we've completely lost this and are unlikely to get it back.
steveBK123 4mo ago
I started buying physical media again, first vinyl and now CDs too. It started as an impulse purchase and then evolved into hunting down various electronic remixes from the 90s heyday that are not available (legally) in electronic form. Then I started to notice more & more how my streaming services were revoking songs out of my playlists, which reminded me I don't own anything I can't hold with in my hands. My final annoyance with the enshittification of streaming music is just the UI/UX of these apps now. I don't want the buttons to move, I don't want a notification, I don't want a popup. I want to press play and listen to music like a big boy. Despite our phones being 100x faster, it seems to take longer and longer to simply do that.
wvh 4mo ago
I've been digitising my music collection since 2000 and still buy CDs or, if available, lossless FLACs. I really wonder how many people still bother "owning" the music they like instead of "renting" it. It might be irrational, but buying it and owning it feels very different than getting it over the radio or some streaming service.
dnemmers 4mo ago
Very glad to see. Vinyl, Casettes, and CDs may be the last physical audio media forever.
valeg 4mo ago
CD Audio may espouse "lindy" properties. No DRM (CD format has resisted attempts) and relative easiness of manufacturing + decent enough audio quality. It is a great engineering achievement and sales are bouncing back!
jghn 4mo ago
I'm in the middle of the GenX zone, and have regularly been seeing bands play at small music clubs my entire adult life. When I was younger they'd sell cassette tapes at their merch booth, and that gave way to CDs. Then at some point in the late 00's that shifted to vinyl because CDs became passe, and while most people had shifted to online music vinyl was cool again. That shifted again in the mid-teens when I started noticing more bands selling cassette tapes, especially in the more underground scenes. Then it was back to vinyl when things got back in action post-COVID. But what I've noticed over the last couple of years is everyone's selling CDs again. What's more, they're *actually focusing on CDs*. Over the last 20-30 years it's been more an assumption that one is going to download the music and sure, maybe buy some physical media at the merch table. Now it seems like the assumption is you're going to just buy the physical media. I've found that interesting.
wombat-man 4mo ago
Let's bring back MiniDisc next!
Gecko4072 4mo ago
I was also about to go back to CDs but realized it’s a pain, and streaming is a completely different, fluid experience. CDs are expensive, if you listen to new artists, it’s a whole process just to buy one. On the other hand, streaming apps now have recommendation algorithms and top charts and paid promotions, etc. My solution has been using Apple Music’s web player with uBlock origin tweaks. Yes I know it’s not lossless, but it’s the best I’ve come up with.
Triphibian 4mo ago
I bought Ween's Brown Box collection in this period. A band's entire studio output on CD for $50 felt like a great value. When I see single CDs at Barnes and Noble with a MSRP of $18 and more I feel otherwise.
rimworld 4mo ago
can't beat a quality DAP
runamuck 4mo ago
I did a FLAC rip of my CD's and now play them on my Astel and Kern MP3 player. It sounds AMAZING, and I don't have a huge binder of CDs cluttering up my office.
frollogaston 4mo ago
"younger audiences appear to be embracing physical formats" Journalists have been saying this like it's a fact for like 15 years now. It's wishful thinking, sorry.

194 points by speckx 4mo ago

geekamongus 4mo ago

Good! As a vinyl collector, the price has gotten way too high. Let this help drive it down.

aduty 4mo ago
This won't affect the price of vinyl. Most CD buyers just don't want a bunch of lawyers ruining their collection as happens on the different services from time to time. Ripping a CD to mp3s and sticking them on a thumb drive is easier than with vinyl, but vinyl has its own tactile experience. The types of nostalgia are not the same. Which is really unfortunate since I would also like more affordable vinyl records.
- criddell 4mo ago
  The tactile experience is one thing, but if you are bothered by the heavy use of compression on CDs (the loudness wars), then vinyl might sound better to you. Now that people aren't listening to CDs in the car, it would be amazing to see some remasters of CDs with the dynamic compression dialed back a bit.
  - BoingBoomTschak 4mo ago
    You seem to be stating a general rule when this concerns only a very small amount of cases (not the loudness war itself, but when the vinyl uses a different and drastically better master) that's also quite dependent on genre. And omit that a lot of music sounds a lot worse on vinyl due to its lack of dynamic range and poor LF capabilities (classical, electronic). This isn't for nothing that the first recording pressed on CD was a rendition of the Alpensinfonie.
    - criddell 4mo ago
      > You seem to be stating a general rule I was trying not to. I thought saying "it might sound better to you" would make it clear that it's a subjective matter of taste.
      - BoingBoomTschak 4mo ago
        I meant "general" with regards to the material, not the listener. I have myself digitized a few rare cases like Celtic Frost's Monotheist because the CD was horrid and I know pop and rock suffered much more from the phenomenon, but unless the music was released first as a vinyl then got later butchered on CD (so before '85~88), it's very rare to have a situation where the vinyl is objectively better. One such case I encountered was Unknown Pleasures (https://world-playground-deceit.net/blog/2025/11/music-review-joy-division-unknown-pleasures-1979-.html https://world-playground-deceit.net/blog/2025/11/music-revie...) but I finally found a CD worth the change. Kraftwerk and Depeche Mode were also bands that gave me much trouble when navigating their haphazard CD master landscape.
  - mypalmike 4mo ago
    This type of remastering (and remixing) has been happening for a while now. Lots of newer releases of classic albums of the CD era have remasters with less compression. Pretty Hate Machine, American Idiot, Absolution (Muse)…
    - jonhohle 4mo ago
      PHM was released before the loudness war. I’ve actually read the opposite about the 2010 remaster. Significantly more compression making all the layers (one of the hallmarks of NIN) inaudible. I’ve listened to the 2010 version, but never felt anything wrong with the original. Fortunately, the original is extremely easy to find and usually very cheap, for comparison.
      - mypalmike 4mo ago
        True, PHM was not the best example.
- threetonesun 4mo ago
  Vinyl is just more cumbersome to make and ship and store, there's no way the price goes down. As someone who only likes vinyl for the art size I'd almost wish CD longboxes or something similar would come back.
  - helterskelter 4mo ago
    Most (all?) new vinyls these days were originally digital files anyways. I like the big album covers though, and the ritual of turning them over in the middle.
    - l72 4mo ago
      I like vinyl (any physical media, i still listen to new bands that only release on cassette) because it is cumbersome and purposeful. You have to flip through a collection and make a conscious decision on what to listen to. You don’t get to just skip skip skip so you tend to pay attention and listen to the full album. I get the convenience of streaming and love it when I’m on the go or need background music, but it is a totally different experience.
    - maccard 4mo ago
      I had my album printed on vinyl a while back. We had very specific instructions on how to prepare it, but it was effectively two files, one for side A and one for side B, and we were told the padding margins for start/end to leave. All vinyl has likely passed through some digital format for the last 45 years. We mastered specifically for vinyl as a format though, the difference between the spotify masters and the vinyl masters is quite significant.

mrguyorama 4mo ago

I have subscribed to Spotify since before 2012. I enjoyed finding new music and the convenience of listening to anything, whenever. My consumption habits are not very amenable to buying CDs, because I have no idea ahead of time which songs will "Hit" for me. I generally don't like "Artists" or "Genres" and I enjoy listening to wildly different music from day to day. However, I have watched Spotify destroy my playlists regularly, and now it seems to happen more than once a year! Songs that they still have a license for and still have on their platform will be removed from your playlist and marked "Unavailable" because some licensing agreement change meant the actual file and unique ID in their system has changed, and they make zero effort to resolve the damage this regularly does to my library and playlists. It makes staying on the spotify platform, the spotify "ecosystem" as it were, utterly worthless. No playlist you make today can be expected to be usable in the future. Any effort you put in to organize and find stuff is for naught. Meanwhile, my shitty folder full of mp3 rips from sketchy sources from highschool has stayed with me, and works perfectly. It's getting hard to justify now. None of the money I pay even goes to the people I listen to, because they are primarily niche and indie groups. Spotify seems to be doing this on purpose, and a close friend of people high up in Spotify is running a business to generate AI music so that spotify can fill up their generated playlists with slop that they don't have to pay anyone for, and which dilutes the rev share for real humans.

teepo 4mo ago
I wonder if that is what itunes match protects against? I've paid for that service for a long time, but at this point not certain it has any value.

Rooster61 4mo ago

While I'm thrilled that kids are experiencing the thrill of buying physical media, I'm not sure CD's are the best way to go. Most of my CD's from my teenage years are no longer playable (partially due to poor upkeep, but some literally from disc rot). But hey, they'll learn the same lesson in a couple of decades haha. I've personally been buying vinyl both because of the fact I missed out on the excitement myself growing up, and because I have some records that came out decades before I was born that play like the day they were minted. They've outlasted pretty much all of my CD's.

nubinetwork 4mo ago
I've noticed that pressed discs work better than burned discs, but thats what backups are for... assuming you can get a working original that is...
- l72 4mo ago
  Yeah burned discs wore out much earlier but it depended a lot on the brand. Fry’s great quality brand (or whatever it was called) did not last long. But my memorex and verbatim still work fine after 30 years of mistreatment!
mrob 4mo ago
I have hundreds of CDs from the 80s and 90s, most of them bought used from charity shops. The vast majority play perfectly, despite some of them having obvious signs of poor storage/handling. I think it's more likely your CD player is failing than your CDs.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- criddell 4mo ago
  I had some CDs that I couldn't get an accurate rip from so I took them to a used games store and they polished them for $1 each and all but one I was able to rip them all perfectly. I think the one that continued to fail must have had a flaw on the label side.

adamm255 4mo ago

The Jumanji “What year is it” meme 100% applies here.

honeycrispy 4mo ago

I built a computer last year and made sure it had a blu-ray drive in it. There are very few cases that have built-in CD bays any more.

ColdStream 4mo ago
My PC case has a complete flat front, very much regret that choice.
- abanana 4mo ago
  Yep, seems they pretty much all do! I couldn't find a sensible case last year when putting together a new PC for my brother, who wanted it to include a CD/DVD drive. (He regularly buys CDs at 10 for £1, listens for a bit then sells them for a lot more on eBay - the demand is there.) I ended up reusing the case from an old computer of my own. I'm sure on my own next upgrade, I'll continue to stick with my existing 20-year-old case, for the same reason. And the drives themselves are 2-3 times the price they were at the peak of their demand (makes sense, they're almost a niche product these days).
  - criddell 4mo ago
    I've been looking for a retro-style case. There are companies that make cases that look like 90's towers (Silverstone), but I'm hoping to find something more like a PS/2 Model 30 (or any PS/2 - so many beautiful designs) or Amiga 1000. Something I can put under my monitor.

tangenter 4mo ago

Personally, I haven’t stopped buying CDs or in certain cases DVDs and Blu-Rays - not of movies but of music. I find it interesting these “went away” but I can see why: nobody I know has a cd player to begin with. A lot of laptops nowadays don’t come with disc trays, and nobody buys a dvd bluray player. Yes, the PS or Xbox can play it but everyone just streams movies or music. So somewhere along the way it disappeared and I doubt it will genuinely come back. It’s a needless headache.

ColdStream 4mo ago
The one thing I hope happens with a revival of CDs/DVDs is that hopefully we get a new generation of players. I still buy movies on DVD but the players are a bit hit and miss. That said, I do frequently see Sony bluray players in second hand stores for a few dollars and that is how I have my collection of players, but that is not a sustainable system. I just wish my PC case had a slot for the drive bay, that was a foolish choice on my behalf.
- tangenter 4mo ago
  I have a pile of my own so I know what you are talking about. I love how even today DVD and Blu Ray players look, long after they were released. They are compact and chic, looking a tad futuristic but not at all the sort of stuff that screams attention-seeking, gaudy design. The kind that you could put unassumingly on a shelf next to a pile of books and wouldn’t even know it’s there without a closer look, or take up to a cottage and leave with a pile of old movies to watch on a dark, gloomy day, like in the old days. One looks at, say, LLMs nowadays and is amazed but, to me personally, we haven’t stopped living in the future for a very long time now. This message was typed on a device with a touch screen no larger than my hand.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
sublinear 4mo ago
I think this is a bit more complicated than that. There's more music and video being made today than ever before and social media is how it gets distributed. Attentive time spent on streaming platforms is completely dwarfed by social media. If at all, people have something streaming in the background while they barely pay attention to it and instead focus on their phones. This aligns with the broader historical trends of the internet creating deep niches. You have to take the good with the bad. We wouldn't even be discussing physical media at all without the internet being how it is. Despite there being a large audience for physical media, they're not the majority. The majority has moved on.

needSomeCoffee 4mo ago

Buy. Rip. Own forever. Compensate artists fairly. My prefered method.

helterskelter 4mo ago

Kids these days want CD's, ipods and the original apple headphones. They call it "retro".

alephnerd 4mo ago
Becuase it is retro. The 1990s and 2000s were a generation ago.
danshipt 4mo ago
I think it’s because they are more convenient: CDs are cheap, you own your music. With iPods you save hundreds of dollars per year, and you get to keep your music (and the iPod shuffle is perfect for working out).

l72 4mo ago

A friend in his 40s had a 90s birthday party so I burned some mix CDs as party favors. Those CDrs were 20 years old and have been sitting in a hot, humid attic for the last 10+ years, but still recorded fine. The real problem was almost no one had a CD player not even in their car! Also, I don’t think k3b or any of the other software i tried has been updated since 2005, but it all still worked great! Most importantly, one of my friends brought it home and his 8 year old was so intrigued by it she came over and we burned a bunch of mix cds for her and her friends! I have no idea if her friends had anyway to play them, but she enjoyed making hand made cover art for each friend. When I was in the attic looking for blank cds I came across a few other spindles of burned cds. Both mixes from my formative years and a bunch my wife had kept. Those times were magical and I few like kids have missed out.

justsomehnguy 4mo ago
Hah! Last year I bought a USB DVD RW drive just for the sake of it. My 5.25" NEC 4xxx (with LightScribe) just quietly died in a PC used daily after around ~5 years of an extremely low usage. My only other ODD was in ThinkPad X301 and I had a feeling it would just die someday too most - and I would know it only when I would need read something. So I just somewhat future-proofed myself a bit. Number of discs I read on that drive is below 10 I think. EDIT: oh, I helped out a friend to transfer some MRI records from a CDR with that drive. Somehow it was easier to send them from the other side of the country to a friend who would ask me to copy it and to send them back electronically.
- dieselgate 4mo ago
  I purchased a DVD player for the first time this past weekend.
  - ColdStream 4mo ago
    It's the funniest thing with DVD and older consoles for that matter. For the first few minutes you can really sense the lower resolution but once you adjust it is perfectly fine. I am actually impressed with how well the image quality on some DVD's are considering it is a 30 year old format. Compare it to the likes of Bink or Sorenson codecs of the time and it looks amazing. Although I think a big part of that is just throwing stacks of bandwidth at the problem.

diego_moita 4mo ago

Playing a physical CD is a bit like going to a movie theatre instead of Netflix. It is a ceremony, a ritual, a physical engagement of respect for the artists that created the work. You don't do that to discardable music, the kind of crap they play on shopping malls, gyms, supermarkets and elevators. You do it to what you recognize as art and worth attention and care.

cdrnsf 4mo ago

Buy CDs, buy vinyl, buy merch, go see shows — support artists instead of platforms and middlemen wherever you can. This is a welcome trend.

arthurjj 4mo ago
I try to buy as many shirts as possible from bands I like and this post reminded me to go look again. I listen to a lot of metal and punk and the problem is most the shirts are either black, which overheat you in SoCal, or have designs that are aggressively ugly [1]. I wish more bands hired better designers or at least had shirts I wouldn't overheat in [1] I own and wear this one so it's not always a deal breaker https://merchbar.imgix.net/product/174/7292/6127313518766/Zsk4ONDQpinkwhiteBrokenWorldTee.jpg?quality=60&auto=compress,format&w=1200&h=630 https://merchbar.imgix.net/product/174/7292/6127313518766/Zs...
- cdrnsf 4mo ago
  I have a ton of shirts, but have been sticking to buy limited edition ones or from bands at shows lately. I live in SoCal (north of LA) and end up suffering in the heat. Nothing did some non-black ones for their new album at least https://bandofnothing.shop/collections/apparel/products/essential-tremors-t-shirt https://bandofnothing.shop/collections/apparel/products/esse...
dylan604 4mo ago
There's a couple of artists that I would absolutely buy their vinyl except the shipping is more expensive than the vinyl. I've done it a couple of times for artists I really like and appreciate, but it is most definitely cost prohibitive. So it's pay their bandcamp prices for the digitals and streaming, but the physical media is just made in too limited quantities to be affordable by anyone but FAANG employees
- cdrnsf 4mo ago
  Shipping on vinyl is rough — even shirts from anywhere outside of the US have tipped towards being hard to justify with shipping and all. I'll usually go for Bandcamp in that case (or buy something licensed in the US in the hopes that the license fee is at least something).

ColdStream 4mo ago

About 10 years back I figured that this was coming. CDs are the best of both worlds. Near perfect audio quality, not too big physically, cannot have the rights revoked, no subscription fees but really easy to rip and put on your phone or whatever. A few years back I saw some people buying collections of thousands of discs for maybe $100. Even if 10% of it was good, that was still a huge win. Those huge hauls are becoming rare now as they have been picked clean. If only Minidisc had better audio quality, it would have REALLY been the perfect medium.

CamelCaseName 4mo ago
There are people who do this at scale, often reselling online. It's definitely for those who are truly passionate about it, and enjoy discovering new things. I gave it a shot, and while profitable, just not for me at all.
jeroenhd 4mo ago
slotMusic/slotRadio has tried to sell music through SD cards. They never took off, but a full SD card would probably be the best balance in terms of reliability, size, and capacity in my opinion. Plus, a surprising amount of media devices still carry SD card readers. Flash storage developments came too late, but the spinning disks and risk of physical damage to the plastic are an annoying risk to have to deal with. Even Minidisc still required some form of physical motion.

bloomca 4mo ago

I have a sizeable collection of CDs and during last year wrote my own CD reader and a ripper CLI. As ridiculous as it sounds, but there is some intent in doing all of that and listening to the files on your hard drive. We have a vynil/CD player as well, but they are not at my workplace.

robotburrito 4mo ago

I recently bought an external cdrom for my laptop. The library here has a wonderful cd collection.

mintflow 4mo ago

recently I bought my 8 years old a cheap new cassette player as a birthday gift which I want to get when I was child Turned out he really love it and I also bought more cassetee as requested from him, and the cost of those cassetee seem surpass the player itself What I find the child seems feel more real if the music play from some gears instead of digital ones, and he know well how to use and find a track in the middle I also want to buy a new cd player which is also I want when I was youth... Maybe people are just tired of the streaming and I also find that there seems to be a surge of new album and music in youtube music now, the album's cover seems being generated by AI, and maybe also the music itself is generated by AI

maingame 4mo ago

In foro interno The internal forum. https://rateyourmusic.com/artist/noise https://rateyourmusic.com/artist/noise

msftgreed 4mo ago

> CD sales surged 16% to 16.3 million units, soundly outpacing vinyl’s comparatively modest 2.4% growth. Ok, but the lack of a unit on vinyl makes it very hard to have an apples to apples comparison here. If cds are selling 1000 units and vinyl is selling 1,000,000 units, those 16% and 2.4% numbers are pretty wildly different things. Also, the huge increase is primarily driven by KPOP (in particular, BTS). CD sales growth was like 6% without them. I don't know that we can draw a conclusion from that 16% except BTS can move physical media.

adzm 4mo ago
Re BTS, really it's just because there is a CD included in the box with all the other stuff you get when you buy the album. My daughter thought it was neat; that's when I realized I don't even have a CD player anywhere. I doubt many people are actually using these CDs
voncheese 4mo ago
Yeah came here to say the same thing on the lack of absolute units. Speaking as an older vinyl collector myself, with kids who have also gotten into it...it would surprise me if the total unit numbers were even within 2 orders of magnitude. Vinyl just feels different. The feeling of holding the cardboard cover and the weight of the album on a turntable can't be replicated at all with CDs.

herrh 4mo ago

In order to make my kids (2 and 4) be able to play music on their own without having to use a smart device or screen i bought an old boombox for like 10 dollars a couple of years ago. We buy a lot of records, though exclusively in goodwill-like stores, and they love it. They have a lot of audiobooks for kids but also cd:s with music. A favourite right now is Aquas debut album Aquarium (the one with Barbie Girl) I think it is really nice for kids to get something physical they can look for themselves in stores and find music that they think looks interesting rather than just what the algorithm would give them were they to use screens (They watch some tv though). But they also seem to love just looking in the booklets and the pictures of the artists or they characters from the books. But it also gives them more freedom to just put on a record if they want rather than having to ask me to put something on our Google Nest. Vinyl records are still too hard to put on and there isn't that much good kids stuff you can find and cassettes are so easy to accidentely tangle. They are still not that good at handling the cd records so they get smudged and jacks and stuff, but i'm looking into buying a CD-R writer so i can easily make new copies of the cd:s that stutter and won't play.

iamben 4mo ago
One of my absolute favourite things as an impressionable teen getting into music was reading through the liner notes in the CD booklets. You'd read the lyrics, see some pictures, and best you'd scour through the thank you section and those would be the bands you'd look for next time you were in the record shop. Great times.
- DoesntMatter22 4mo ago
  The pictures. They told a thousand words. I loved those times. Made me think about what the artist was thinking. 90s had some great CD and cassette booklets
gyulai 4mo ago
I've been on a journey to rediscover cassettes as a medium this year, both for myself and my kid. For myself, the motivation was ownership over streaming and wanting to support the long tail of artists (or, anyways, the subset whose music I happen to like). For my kid, my motivation looks just like yours: not wanting to give him access to smart devices and wanting to keep him away from screens. The big learning was that, almost inevitably, one has to divorce the medium used for purchase from the medium used for consumption (which eliminates vinyl from consideration right there). When I started actually buying cassettes from artists on BandCamp, I quickly realized that I was paying way more for shipping costs and customs duties than for the actual media. Artists often offer the cassette including the digital album on BandCamp at similar prices to just the digital. Makes sense, if you consider that the digital doesn't add any real marginal cost. But, once you factor in the cost of tape stock, production, packaging/handling, often done by the artists themselves, I almost feel bad about taking advantage of their generosity. My intention is to financially support them, but I'm finding it hard to believe that, on the other end of all of these costs, there is any money left over for them. ...so, I tended to use the BandCamp feature for tipping/overpaying, but too much of that got eaten up by taxes and my collector / music enjoyment hobby just became too expensive over all, that way. So, I stopped buying physical. My plan is to set up some kind of system to help me stay organized with self-hosted music files, and then re-booting my collecting hobby by buying one-time digital downloads on BandCamp Fridays or directly from artists. Maybe, I will also make mix tapes from time to time for myself or to give to other people. -- I think, in this context, the degrading-quality of analogue is a feature not a bug, because the ideal outcome would be for friends to enjoy single tracks from albums in degraded quality from the mix tapes, and then look up the artists they like and buy full albums as high-quality digital downloads, and support the artists that way. For the kid, I got a vintage Fisher Price cassette player, and am finding it hard to believe that anything based on CDs could match the sturdy build quality. Also, with a toddler, it's a given that the media will be in contact with the floor a lot and scratch. So, this is another area where the cassette is a clear winner. The third learning is about the actual process of making the cassettes: Right now, I have a tablet connected to a vintage tape deck through an analogue cable, and that's a surprisingly low-friction way to turn any kind of content that you can actually play into a cassette. Trying to stay within the digital realm to burn a CD means fighting the DRM platforms of each channel you're sourcing content through separately (with each presenting a moving target through time). That can get quite exhausting. I guess, if quality is not so much of a concern (which, with cassettes you're throwing out the window from the get-go), one can always use some kind of a screen-recording tool to record desktop audio, so, maybe, this is not a fair comparison. Fourth, cassettes are easy to recycle: If I have a mixtape that I no longer listen to, or my kid outgrows a given piece of content, I can just record over it. I can buy boxes full of old cassettes as attic-finds on e-bay dirt-cheap, and get some use out of that stuff. This seems more environmentally friendly and sustainable than paying an industry to keep producing something that will inevitably be garbage one day. Maybe CD-RWs present a similar opportunity; not sure (never really looked into it much). I also buy some new tape stock from Recording The Masters, though, because I dig what they're doing, and want to support them. So, regarding that whole trend of bringing back physical media, my pick is the cassette.

karlkloss 4mo ago

Vinyl records were a pain in the back, tapes were a pain in the back, CDs were a pain in the back. I still remember the day when mp3 became publicly available. I immediately started ripping and converting everything, and never looked back. Nowadays, I can buy a $3 microcontroller board and make it play mp3's. And it'll outlive most CDs that are pressed today, so what?

gregjw 4mo ago

its happening

ErneX 4mo ago

Most of the vinyls I buy are used.

pjmlp 4mo ago

I stop buying vinyl still during the early 90's, but I surely do buy CDs to this day. In some case I do buy MP3 directly from online stores, if not available as CD, and burn the CD as well. Never had a Spotify account, nor plan to.

jillesvangurp 4mo ago

I grew up in the eighties. Tapes, records, cds, etc. I've seen it all. I haven't used a device that can play any of these in over two decades. I have more music at my fingertips in Spotify than I ever had on these. Love it. I was a teenager in a small provincial town in the Netherlands. It had two record stores. They were small. There was also the library with a small collection of decent cds that you could "borrow" (copy to tape). If it wasn't on the radio or in those stores, or in the library, I had no access to it. That was how I built my music collection. Buying albums properly was expensive. I only had about 10 or so. I had a few dozen tapes. Maybe 60 Albums or so and some mix tapes. That was it. Compared to what I have on Spotify, that's nothing. There's all this BS. how everything was better on "hifi" equipment of the 1980s. The reality of course was that most poor teenagers did not have access to either decent equipment or decent music. I tracked down most of what I had in physical form on Spotify ages ago. And I even listen to some of it regularly. Sounds great with decent modern headphones. I'm perfectly happy with my Sennheiser bluetooth headphones. It probably sounds infinitely better than what I had back in the day. I alsp have a much wider selection of music. Anything I want really. And of course I'm now in my fifties and my hearing isn't what it used to be in terms of high frequencies. I'm about average in hearing loss (i.e. not going deaf) but any absurdly priced headphones would probably be wasted on me. That's the irony of aging audiophiles, right when they can afford all the right gear, their hearing starts deteriorating. You can't compensate for that with gold plated plugs or any of the other nonsense people are into. Records and analog amplifiers sound nice mainly because of the sound distortion and compression. This isn't all that hard to emulate with digital processing. The pop music of the nineteen eighties was optimized for the cheap FM radios that most people had. That's why a lot of albums got remastered later. The original sound is not actually all that great on modern equipment.

HackerThemAll 4mo ago

Sorry but vinyls don't offer anything but nostalgia for "old, good times", and approach to the audiophile crowd of insane people. I don't buy into these crackles. I stopped using MP3. A high quality OPUS file format is the way to go for me. I can take the whole music library in my pocket to the places with no internet, listen through good enough in-ear headphones, or with a small speaker (if for more people), and charge that stuff with a small foldable solar panel on the go, next to the tent. Try this with your gramophone. YMMV.

defrost 4mo ago
> Sorry but vinyls don't offer anything but nostalgia That's simply incorrect on the face of it, as others have pointed out vinyls offers a curated physical object per clump of music tracks. Maybe that's not for you, which is fine; but for a number of people, young people today and older people that grew up with records that's a different way of engaging with the media and the artists presentation of media than a faceless, artless, beige device on shuffle. A large physical album cover with artwork, lyrics, details, etc. is something that some people just like - and was liked even in the days when there was no nostalgia attached to the packaging. Yoto has a market for children because it has a device driven by physical cards. ~ https://yotoplay.com/ https://yotoplay.com/ Yeah, I've got an original metal tin from a 1968 purchase as a child: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogdens%27_Nut_Gone_Flake#Design_and_packaging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogdens%27_Nut_Gone_Flake#Desig...
intrikate 4mo ago
I mean, I could take an amplifier, my speakers and my turntable all with a big battery station anywhere I want to play records. Less convenient, sure, but "I can take it with me!" is not the win you expect here, haha.
nephihaha 4mo ago
The best thing about vinyl is the covers. The artwork and sleeve notes look great due to the size. Cassettes and CDs don't work as well that way.

thenthenthen 4mo ago

Next up: MiniDisc!

nephihaha 4mo ago
MiniDisc never took off in some parts of the world, so little real nostalgia in those places.
- thenthenthen 4mo ago
  Its so funny, after this vinyl revival a couple of years ago (well…10-15?) I jokingly told my friends CD’s would be next, I even produced some CD player prototypes in anticipation (sadly all the transports I got were mostly faulty+dead lasers and I shelved the project…maybe I should pick it back up again?)
  - nephihaha 4mo ago
    There was the cassette thing a few years ago. Cassettes were good in that you could drop them on the ground and they would be okay. Not so gold when they got tangled. I don't think vinyl ever fully went out of fashion.

basisword 4mo ago

I recently started buying CD's again (also have bought vinyl for a couple of decades now). Something it made me realise is that we've lost the 'gift' of music. Giving/receiving CD's as gifts was always a joy. Copying CD's for friends too if you thought they might like it. With streaming we've completely lost this and are unlikely to get it back.

steveBK123 4mo ago

I started buying physical media again, first vinyl and now CDs too. It started as an impulse purchase and then evolved into hunting down various electronic remixes from the 90s heyday that are not available (legally) in electronic form. Then I started to notice more & more how my streaming services were revoking songs out of my playlists, which reminded me I don't own anything I can't hold with in my hands. My final annoyance with the enshittification of streaming music is just the UI/UX of these apps now. I don't want the buttons to move, I don't want a notification, I don't want a popup. I want to press play and listen to music like a big boy. Despite our phones being 100x faster, it seems to take longer and longer to simply do that.

wvh 4mo ago

I've been digitising my music collection since 2000 and still buy CDs or, if available, lossless FLACs. I really wonder how many people still bother "owning" the music they like instead of "renting" it. It might be irrational, but buying it and owning it feels very different than getting it over the radio or some streaming service.

dnemmers 4mo ago

Very glad to see. Vinyl, Casettes, and CDs may be the last physical audio media forever.

valeg 4mo ago

CD Audio may espouse "lindy" properties. No DRM (CD format has resisted attempts) and relative easiness of manufacturing + decent enough audio quality. It is a great engineering achievement and sales are bouncing back!

jghn 4mo ago

I'm in the middle of the GenX zone, and have regularly been seeing bands play at small music clubs my entire adult life. When I was younger they'd sell cassette tapes at their merch booth, and that gave way to CDs. Then at some point in the late 00's that shifted to vinyl because CDs became passe, and while most people had shifted to online music vinyl was cool again. That shifted again in the mid-teens when I started noticing more bands selling cassette tapes, especially in the more underground scenes. Then it was back to vinyl when things got back in action post-COVID. But what I've noticed over the last couple of years is everyone's selling CDs again. What's more, they're *actually focusing on CDs*. Over the last 20-30 years it's been more an assumption that one is going to download the music and sure, maybe buy some physical media at the merch table. Now it seems like the assumption is you're going to just buy the physical media. I've found that interesting.

wombat-man 4mo ago

Let's bring back MiniDisc next!

Gecko4072 4mo ago

I was also about to go back to CDs but realized it’s a pain, and streaming is a completely different, fluid experience. CDs are expensive, if you listen to new artists, it’s a whole process just to buy one. On the other hand, streaming apps now have recommendation algorithms and top charts and paid promotions, etc. My solution has been using Apple Music’s web player with uBlock origin tweaks. Yes I know it’s not lossless, but it’s the best I’ve come up with.

Triphibian 4mo ago

I bought Ween's Brown Box collection in this period. A band's entire studio output on CD for $50 felt like a great value. When I see single CDs at Barnes and Noble with a MSRP of $18 and more I feel otherwise.

rimworld 4mo ago

can't beat a quality DAP

runamuck 4mo ago

I did a FLAC rip of my CD's and now play them on my Astel and Kern MP3 player. It sounds AMAZING, and I don't have a huge binder of CDs cluttering up my office.

frollogaston 4mo ago

"younger audiences appear to be embracing physical formats" Journalists have been saying this like it's a fact for like 15 years now. It's wishful thinking, sorry.