CD sales growth outpaced vinyl in the first half of 2026

https://consequence.net/2026/07/the-cd-revival-is-getting-hard-to-ignore/

by speckx • 6 days ago

194 219 6 days 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• 6 days 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.

geekamongus• 6 days ago

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

aduty• 6 days 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.

criddell7• 6 days 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.

threetonesun• 6 days 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.

Rooster61• 6 days 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• 6 days 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...

l724• 6 days 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• 6 days 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.

criddell7• 5 days 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.

l724• 6 days ago

Agree with the siblings. I have hundreds of CDs in binders. They have lived in the unconditioned storage, very hot and humid attics, and on the floorboards of cars and for the most part, very few have any issues. It is quite incredible.

But storage is cheap so also rip it and burn an additional copy in case!

terribleperson• 2 days ago

I rip CDs as they enter my house, so I don't have to worry about decay.

adamm255• 6 days ago

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

honeycrispy• 6 days 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.

ColdStream8• 6 days ago

My PC case has a complete flat front, very much regret that choice.

abanana• 6 days 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).

tangenter2• 6 days 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.

ColdStream8• 6 days 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.

tangenter2• 6 days 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.

sublinear• 6 days 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.

mrpippy• 6 days ago

For some reason, the PS4 and PS5 actually cannot play audio CDs

jedbrooke• 6 days ago

audio CDs use a different wavelength for the laser (infra red) while PS game disks are BluRay (blue laser).

Of course, 99.9% of other BluRay players will also support DVD/CD, so yeah it still does seem silly.

I also remember my Dad’s disappointment when he put a standard DVD in our Wii back in the day. Those are literally the same physical format as wii disks.

justsomehnguy5• 6 days ago

If true this is quite ironic because being able to be a media centre for a household is what propelled the sales of PS1 and PS2.

needSomeCoffee• 6 days ago

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

helterskelter2• 6 days ago

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

alephnerd• 6 days ago

Becuase it is retro. The 1990s and 2000s were a generation ago.

danshipt• 6 days 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).

l724• 6 days 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.

justsomehnguy5• 6 days 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• 6 days ago

I purchased a DVD player for the first time this past weekend.

throw0101d3• 6 days ago

The real problem was almost no one had a CD player not even in their car!

And here I am driving a 2003 Golf with a tape deck (and CD player).

netsharc2• 6 days ago

My car reads USB sticks with MP3s on them (I was telling a Gen-Z colleague this and felt old...). There are external BluRay drives that connect via USB, but then to he able to play audio CDs, either the car needs to understand CDDA, or the drive needs to understand CDDA and pretend to be a FAT32 filesystem of some MP3s (or... WAVs?) to the car.

Huh I also have Subsonic on my home NAS and Symfonium on my phone (connectable via Android Auto). Another Rube Goldberg invention would be to put the audio CD in the drive connected to the NAS, have a driver that pretends to be a filesystem of MP3s but actually encodes the CD tracks (on the fly on every playback, of course!), stream it over the Internet to my phone, that's connected to Android Auto. That's how to play a CD on a modern car!

q7xvh97o2pDhNrh• 6 days ago

And here I am driving a 2003 Golf with a tape deck (and CD player).

That sounds wonderful.

There was a brief, magical moment in history when cars would come with AM/FM radio, a tape deck, a CD player, and an aux port so that you could plug in audio from every other device that humanity would invent for the rest of time.

It feels like the most fleeting of moments, and it was so long ago. Maybe it was just one summer afternoon in the early 2000s.

Anyway, I think we've largely been going downhill since then. For whatever reason, humanity achieved a lovely little peak of engineering, and then we immediately abandoned it for worse options.

piskov• 6 days ago

However if you’ve tried to read those cd-rw after 20-30 years, they would most likely be corrupted.

Factory stampted cds are better in this regard

shimman3• 6 days ago

Is there a reason why or is it just the quality of the materials?

asciimov2• 6 days ago

Factory stamps are still not immune to bit rot, even when stored in ideal conditions.

m4633• 5 days ago

Factory stamped cds are better in this regard

One thing factory CDs don't do well is spin. I think they were probably balanced good enough for 1x, but trying to rip some of them at 48x is noisy and feels close to explosive deconstruction.

kevstev3• 4 days ago

So I actually had a use case for this last month. My NAS is too weak to run immich well, so I dusted off my old sandybridge core i7 laptop from ~2011, and it actually benchmarks about 4x my nas, and has 8GB of RAM. But it was still loaded with windows. Long story short, its actually kind of difficult these days to install linux on such an old box, distros have become massive. I searched around in my closet and found my old spindle of burned CDs- and I wanted to go on a nostalgia trip, and every one I tried worked! I used Kodak Golds, which have lived up to their hype.

I even burned a CD of the smallest ubuntu distro I could find, and its happily running linux and hosting Immich, among other things.

smelendez• 6 days ago

The most common CD players around now are probably video game consoles.

ColdStream8• 6 days ago

And even then I think it is only up to the 360/Ps3 generation. After that they only play DVD's/Blu Ray as it is a cheaper laser component.

shimman3• 6 days ago

Funny because the CD player in my car has been dead for like 16 years but the cassette player has never been better. Wonder why the cassette player lasted much longer, guessing the optical drive in the car is damaged because CDs will fail to read after like 10 second.

6031769• 5 days ago

Do you drive over a lot of cattle grids?

CD players are precision items and don't take kindly to high impulse. Conversely, many tape decks are seriously robust. My dad had an old Grundig tape deck that was built like a tank (or a 380Z). Pretty sure whoever has that now is still getting quality sounds out of it.

mbs1592• 6 days ago

The real problem was almost no one had a CD player not even in their car!

That's wild. Popping in a CD is part of the road trip experience!

w4der• 6 days ago

I remember the frustration of hitting a washboarded dirt road and the CD jumping around and messing playback.

kleiba22• 6 days ago

One of the hobby projects that I want to do, and hopefully will find the time for before we get rid of my wife's car, is to retrofit it with a CD player, powered by a Raspberry Pi or something alike. It could nicely live in the glove compartment and I believe the in-car entertainment system is already equipped with an aux port.

grahamburger• 6 days ago

Ha, this reminded me-when I was a teenager I had an old beat-up car that didn't have a CD player or an AUX port. I also had an old boombox that had removable speakers. I removed the glove box from the car and, with the speakers removed, the boombox fit perfectly into the open space. I powered it with an inverter and used one of those old tapes that played from a headphone jack to connect the boombox to the car sound system. It sounded like dirt, and I got a strange look from a cop when I got pulled over and didn't have a glove box in which to keep my registration, but it worked!

specproc• 6 days ago

I did the same for a friend's birthday recently: put together a bunch of mix CDs as a present. My concession to the fact he probably doesn't use a CD player much was a QR code, with a link to a matching Spotify playlist.

MrDOS• 5 days ago

Two years ago, we sent CDs as our wedding invitations. We also received a lot of feedback to the effect that lots of our guests had difficulty finding a way to play the discs (including at least one person who was incredulous that the CD was real; but that might be because we sent vinyl-effect CDs).

I put a Spotify code[0] to the playlist on the back cover as a concession to streaming, but if anyone knew what it was and used it, they never told me.

[0] https://www.spotifycodes.com/

2OEH8eoCRo0• 5 days ago

It's hard to buy people media now. You can't really gift people CDs, DVDs, or Blu-Rays because nobody has players anymore.

kevincox• 5 days ago

A USB drive with FLAC files works pretty well. It doesn't have the same feel as a CD with art though.

For movies there isn't a legal way to acquire proper files unfortunately.

tiborsaas• 5 days ago

It's safe to assume to buy them a player device too with the CD :)

tayo42• 5 days ago

Game consoles play all of those.

For now I guess lol

m4633• 5 days ago

Send a player too. :)

diego_moita• 6 days 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.

cdrnsf4• 6 days 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• 6 days 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/Zs...

cdrnsf4• 6 days 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/esse...

dylan60410• 6 days 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

cdrnsf4• 6 days 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).

nickthegreek• 6 days ago

I’m not sure if you live in big city or not, but if so, a visit to your local vinyl shop might be able to score you a copy. Or they might be able to order it in with their shipments.

Acrobatic_Road2• 6 days ago

I import a lot of stuff from Europe and the shipping is rough. I save by bundling items.

maccard4• 6 days ago

I've not seen a case where shipping was more expensive than vinyl but;

I made an album and sell the vinyl on our website. The sleeve to ship the vinyl safely in was somewhere between £0.5 and £1 depending on where we bought it from. Actually shipping it cost £5. So the £30 vinyl came with £6 in shipping fees. Lots of people complained to us that it was expensive, but that's just what it cost.

localbolu• 6 days ago

I've been turning back to radio. So many talented DJs playing great music around the world.

squigz• 5 days ago

KEXP is great for this - various types of live shows and sets with great DJs. Most of the new music I've discovered over the past 10 years has been from them.

https://www.kexp.org/

frollogaston2• 5 days ago

I only listen to FM radio in the car. This has forced me to kinda enjoy Mexican music, cause it's either that or 1980s millennials' nostalgia channels.

beenBoutIT• 5 days ago

All we really need is a solid system for adding all of the 100k+ internet radio stations to a synthetic radio spectrum that can be easily navigated with a rotary dial just like local radio.

pibaker• 5 days ago

None of the things you listed are free of middlemen. Record companies were the OG villains of the music industry. Livenation has a monopoly over event venues.

Sometimes you can't just outrun the bad guys. You have to fight them head on.

ColdStream8• 6 days 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• 6 days 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• 5 days 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• 6 days 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• 6 days ago

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

mintflow• 6 days 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• 6 days ago

In foro interno

The internal forum.

https://rateyourmusic.com/artist/noise

msftgreed• 6 days 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• 5 days 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• 5 days 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.

herrh2• 6 days 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• 6 days 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• 6 days 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

gyulai2• 6 days 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.

herrh2• 5 days ago

Yeah, i also started considering introducing cassettes for several of the reasons you state above, especially the ease in which you can make the cassettes. I have been a little hesitant because it feels like buying empty cassettes is pretty hard when it comes to the cost, it is pretty cheap to buy a lot of empty CD:s (In Sweden you can get 10 for less than a dollar each) but cassettes are several times more expensive and there is a much bigger lack of options for cassettes in second hand-stores.

But you have a great point regarding the durability (and the sound and esthetics). I have been a bit afraid of them playing with the tape and me having to detangle it, but maybe that is not such a big problem. Especially when it comes to compact players, i bought a cheap second hand portable cd-player for my 4 year old to listen to with headphones, but they seem very easily breakable compared to an old tape deck. But now i'm feeling pretty inspired so I think I might try getting hold of an old portable tape deck and try!

dyauspitr• 5 days ago

Why cassettes besides the nostalgia though? I still remember that hiss and how crap they sounded. Almost as bad as those 480p DVDs.

21asdffdsa12• 6 days ago

Anyone else remember the superb manuals that used to come with games? The starcrat and warcraft manuals. Drawings and lore. Diablo. Those old games came with books.

criddell7• 5 days ago

The Infocom games always had fun stuff in the box.

https://gallery.guetech.org/hhgttg/hhgttg.html

krogenx• 5 days ago

I remember fondly spending countless hours looking through the Icewind Dale manual.

Unfortunately, I purchased Baldur’s Gate 1/2 many years later with no manual. I’m sure it had an awesome manual as well.

kibwen• 5 days ago

The Civ III manual was 242 pages long: https://archive.org/details/Civilization_3_-_Manual/mode/2up

thaumasiotes2• 5 days ago

Lemmings 2 came with a short story describing the journey of Jimmy McLemming around the Lemmings world. It was great.

FacelessJim• 5 days ago

I remember the smell of a freshly opened game, damn still gives me shivers of excitement

CalRobert• 5 days ago

TIE Fighter even had a novella that worked in-came commands in to the story.

I recall SimEarth having a multi-hundred page spiral-bound manual (though my memory is hazy)

I pored over them obsessively.

mk_stjames2• 5 days ago

Nothing was worse however than getting a game used and not getting the manual included, when the manual contained very necessary information to progress through the game, and in an era where 'The Web' still wasn't really a thing....

I'm looking at you, 1993's Journeyman Project....

bigstrat20032• 5 days ago

Yeah. I remember going to the store to buy Starcraft 2 physically, specifically because Blizzard had always had such good manuals. Then there was nothing in there. It was such a letdown.

Eddy_Viscosity2• 3 days ago

Even if those books were to come back now, they would be AI-generated slop. I am sad for the future of creative works.

gib444• 6 days ago

A favourite right now is Aquas debut album Aquarium (the one with Barbie Girl)

That's awesome. I remember when that song came out. Those were the days...

(I hope it isn't driving you crazy haha(

loloquwowndueo• 5 days ago

Vinyl records are still too hard to put on

Nonsense. Me and my bro happily put records of fairy tales and Disney movie adaptations back in the 80s on our crappy portable record player (don’t you dare call this thing a turntable). Harder than a cd? For sure. Too hard for a 5 year old? Certainly not, as long as you don’t mind the record itself facing some rough handling. Which they survived just fine, anyway.

hoherd• 5 days ago

My way of giving my kids access to music without screens was to buy a battery powered mp3 playing radio, then fill an SD card with music and pop it into the player. I put a mix of kids songs, classic songs, and things I enjoy that I'd want them to also enjoy. I have some very cute videos of my daughter skipping through the songs. It was always a bit heartbreaking for her to get to one of my favorites and then skip over it, but it was also adorable to watch her stop on a song unexpectedly and sing along with it. One video in particular that is dear to me is her singing along to If I Fell by The Beatles. Also funny is she'd play All I Ask of You by Skrillex over and over.

m4633• 5 days ago

I agree on physically exploring.

It is always nice to take younger folks to the used DVD/CD store and let them explore. It is not expensive.

There's also a strange paradox, where the better stuff is cheaper. (technically it is probably popular stuff is cheaper). The dvds of season 1 of Friends is usually $1.

and sometimes you can get 4k UHD disks for cheap.

edbaskerville• 5 days ago

Exact same story here. Same age kids (well, one just turned 5). I wonder how many CDs are being sold just because of parents trying to protect their kids from device addiction.

karlkloss• 6 days 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• 6 days ago

its happening

ErneX• 6 days ago

Most of the vinyls I buy are used.

pjmlp• 6 days 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• 6 days 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• 6 days 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• 6 days 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/

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#Desig...

intrikate• 5 days 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.

nephihaha3• 5 days 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.

thenthenthen2• 6 days ago

Next up: MiniDisc!

nephihaha3• 5 days ago

MiniDisc never took off in some parts of the world, so little real nostalgia in those places.

thenthenthen2• 3 days 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?)

basisword• 6 days 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• 6 days 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• 5 days 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• 5 days ago

Very glad to see.

Vinyl, Casettes, and CDs may be the last physical audio media forever.

valeg• 5 days 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• 5 days 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• 5 days ago

Let's bring back MiniDisc next!

Gecko4072• 5 days 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• 5 days 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• 5 days ago

can't beat a quality DAP

runamuck• 5 days 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.

frollogaston2• 5 days 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.

CD sales growth outpaced vinyl in the first half of 2026

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