Back to CD Land
A love letter to physical media in the digital age
When I was 15 or 16 years old, I made myself a promise: Before I left high school, I’d buy all of my favorite albums on CD.
I was deeply immersed in the Tumblr indie scene of the mid-2010s, getting into artists like The Strokes, Sufjan Stevens, Two Door Cinema Club, and of course, my all-time favorite: Arctic Monkeys. (A good 80 percent of my Tumblr blog was just pictures of Alex Turner and lyrics/audio tracks of songs from the first four Arctic Monkey albums.)
My taste in music was a point of pride for my teenage self, to the point where I kinda felt like I was cooler than most people for knowing bands that they didn’t. Very few of my favorite songs were on the radio. And when artists I liked came to town, it was almost always at smaller venues where the tickets were cheap and the shows rarely sold out.
But being a cool indie kid was also … lonely as hell. So I spent a lot of time holed up in my bedroom, lingering in online spaces where I could chat with people who had similar interests. Most of my friends irl did not know or care about the bands I liked (at least to the extent that I did).
Even though I discovered most of my favorite musicians online as a teen, my whole youth was spent consuming physical media — VHS tapes, DVDs, cassettes, CDs. And I felt like the best way to have a true archive of my favorite bands I listened to as a teenager would be to buy their albums on CD.
There’s a certain permanence to having physical copies of music that I’ve always appreciated. Even after I got my first iPod (RIP) and started buying songs on iTunes, there was a part of me that didn’t really enjoy buying digital copies of an artist’s work. It felt so transactional. Of course the process of buying music is a transaction, but getting the thing you bought via instant download just doesn’t feel special.
I didn’t just want to listen to my favorite albums, I wanted to hold them in my hands. I wanted to flip thru the liner notes and learn new band lore and absorb the lyrics to my favorite songs in full detail. I also wanted to have something tangible to show friends, family, and me future self when I reminisced on my high school days.
Those were wise thoughts for a teenager, and I often wish I could get in a time machine and go back to thank my past self for building a music archive.
I don’t have everything I liked from that time on CD, but I do have a lot of it. And lately I’ve spent a lot of time with those albums, thanks to my fiance’s recent obsession with collecting every CD under the sun.
Ryan has been DJing at our library’s internet radio station (did you know libraries can have radio stations?? I did not) which has inspired him to start building up a stockpile of physical media. Both of us have spent the past few years mostly listening to music on Spotify and YouTube. But you’re not supposed to use music streaming services on the air, since apps like Spotify are only licensed for personal consumption.
So really, the way you get a robust music library to play on a radio show is by actually buying the music you like. If your show or station is well-known, it’s likely that music publishers will also send you free music as part of their marketing strategy — but for a small, local station still building up a listener base, that’s unlikely.
As of late, Ryan has turned into a CD bloodhound. He’s gone to every store in our area that might have a chance of stocking physical media in the hopes of finding stuff that’s at least playable, even if he doesn’t know anything about the artist. I recently joined him on his weekly trip to the thrift store, where he bought two Michael Bolton albums and some classic Christmas music, among other things.
The whole point of these trips is to bulk up his music collection, even if it’s not all stuff he’ll play on the radio for sure. Almost everything Ryan buys is secondhand; mostly old, discarded albums that go for like, 50 cents or a dollar on the shelves of the thrift. There’s also sites like Discogs where he’ll pick up albums from artists he already likes, plus some smaller record labels where he’ll occasionally buy stuff new.
All this CD-buying means that stacks of discs have become a fixture in our living room. Ryan buys more albums than he can keep track of, while slowly digitizing and then filing them away into shoeboxes, bookshelves, or drawers. It’s become a whole project.
For Black Friday, he bought a CD player at Best Buy because it was super cheap. He fondly calls it our “boombox.” (I think that term was in the official listing at the store, but something about that word just feels so 80s.)
Most days when Ryan is away at work, I’ll put a CD in the player instead of listening to Spotify. I gotta admit, the habit is growing on me.
It takes me back to the days when I would listen to new discs on a CD player in my bedroom while drawing, writing, or scrolling on Tumblr. Something about the isolated sound of a boombox in the corner of your room feels so much more grounded than a bass-heavy Bluetooth speaker or an HD home soundsystem. Like, I’m just trying to turn on some background noise, not saturate my entire home with sound so that I can’t even think straight.
I also like the fact that CDs are a lot less distracting than web streaming. Once I’ve picked something to listen to, I almost always listen to it all the way through before jumping to a new album. There’s no messing with playlists or daily mixes or skipping through my song library while I complain that there’s just nothing to listen to.
And of course, there’s the elephant in the room with streaming services: many of them pay artists terribly. I think Spotify’s average is like .003 or .004 cents per stream, which is abysmal for a company that pulls in billions every year. If you’re an artist on Spotify who gets a million streams per month, you’ll make a whopping $3000 or $4000 — which is more than what a lot of small artists are making.
Of course, some money is better than no money. I’m not one to tell people not to use streaming at all, or to declare that artists shouldn’t upload their music to Spotify. But for me, as a consumer who cares about the welfare of the people who actually make the things I like, I know one of the best ways to show my appreciation for musicians I like is to buy physical copies of their work. I did that years ago when I was building my high school music archive, and now I’m slowly making the jump back.
However, I’ll admit that owning albums on CD is like 80 percent nostalgia for me. I don’t really care all that much about audio quality, which is why I’m not a vinyl collector (also my cheap Victrola is broken and I don’t feel like getting a new one).
CDs just take me back to a simpler time when I’d take discs from my dad’s collection to play in my car or wander through the discount music section at Barnes and Noble as a teen. It reminds me of the years when I was branching out into the musical genres that later became defining parts of my personality.
In another decade, I’ll probably thank myself (and Ryan) for collecting all the CDs we’re stocking up on now. Even if it’s more than we need, it’ll be a welcome reminder of our life in this present moment.