FEATURE:
Delectable Collectables
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What Is the Future of the Compact Disc?
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I wrote about it recently…
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but the compact disc has a big anniversary this year. Though they were invented in the late-1970s, the first album to be released on CD was Billy Joel's 52nd Street. It was released alongside Sony's CDP-101 on 1st October, 1982 in Japan. On 2nd March, 1983, CD players and discs were released in the United States and other markets. Compact discs recently increased in terms of sales for the first time in seventeen years. That takes us back to 2004/2005. It is strange to think that a music listening format that we all know about has been struggling for so many years. I think it is relative. The rise in streaming numbers and vinyl sales does not necessarily indicate a lack of love and relevance for the CD. Alongside a desire to pay for content and, hopefully, more of that revenue will end up with artists compared to streaming, there is a slightly nostalgic edge. Lots of people have grown up listening to CDs, so they have reconnected with that during the pandemic. Also, there is that desire for something physical. A music connection you get with vinyl, CDs and cassettes. To me, we are seeing the start of a new rise that, whilst it may not last for years, is a revival. The past few years especially have been grim when it comes to the health of the CD. Talks of its demise and irrelevance have been presented by the media. Maybe this is not the big explosion we would like to see, though increased sales are positive news. The Guardian wrote about it earlier this month:
“After languishing in his car boot for several years, Jordan Bassett’s CD collection – mostly dating back to his teenage years – will soon be on proud display in his newly converted home office space.
Bassett, a commissioning editor at the NME, has no means of playing the CDs and, in any case, his musical tastes have moved on. But the 100-150 thin, shiny 5in discs have sentimental value – and, who knows, one day they may be part of a revival similar to vinyl among music aficionados.
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Although the decision by Tesco this week to clear its shelves of CDs was an unambiguous indication of the decline of the once-revolutionary music format, it’s not dead yet.
Last year, UK sales of physical entertainment products fell 18.5% to just over £1bn, while digital revenues rose by 8.3% to £8.7bn, according to the Entertainment Retailers Association.
In 2007, at the height of the CD market, more than 2bn discs were sold globally. The digital streaming platform Spotify launched in 2008, and CD sales started their trajectory downwards.
But towards the end of last year, there was a blip on the graph. CD sales rose by 15%, mainly thanks to Adele’s 30, which sold nearly 900,000 in CD form, Abba’s Voyage and Ed Sheeran’s =.
In a love letter to CDs published in Rolling Stone last month, Rob Sheffield wrote: “Compact discs were never about romance – they were about function. They just worked. They were less glamorous than vinyl, less cool, less tactile, less sexy, less magical. They didn’t have the aura that we fans crave.
“You didn’t necessarily get sentimental over your CDs, the way you fetishised your scratchy old vinyl, hearing your life story etched into the nicks and crackles …. But CDs work. They just do. You pop in the disc, press play, music booms out. They delivered the grooves so efficiently, they became the most popular format ever.”
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He lauded CD “boxsets, bootlegs, mixes from friends old and new, young bands whose albums I buy from the merch table at live shows”, and lamented the ephemeral nature of streaming culture.
A recent article in Wired magazine also praised the CD format, and its “ridiculous affordability”. Streaming was for the masses, vinyl was for hipsters, said the author, but his experiment in CD listening had brought “unexpected joys”.
Despite the convenience of streaming music at the touch of a keypad, some fans prefer to have tangible collections, complete with liner notes, to pore over, arrange and rearrange.
And, as Adele pointed out to Spotify when threatening to pull her latest album from the platform unless it hid the shuffle button, “our art tells a story and our stories should be listened to as we intended”.
Bassett said: “We may be seeing the end of CDs as a mass-market product, but we could also be seeing the beginning of the repositioning of the CD as a more fetishistic item.”
But, he added, it was unlikely to match the vinyl revival of recent years. “There is not the same romance, the magic of dropping a needle on to vinyl. The plastic cases cracked easily. I remember listening to Nirvana’s Nevermind on the school bus and every time that the bus went over a bump, your CD would skip”.
I shall end with a bit about the positives and negatives when it comes to CDs. I will also talk about the future of the format. It is not only the U.K. where there is a new love of the humble compact disc. As Pitchfork write, American audiences and buyers are showing their love – even if the incline in sales does not indicate profitable news for artists hoping to rely on CDs to bolster their bank accounts:
“Clearly, no one is saying that the compact disc will have enough economic force to (nearly!) send a pop star into space. But record sellers contacted by Pitchfork maintain that CD sales have indeed been on the rise, and some Gen Z music fans are happy to enthuse about their affection for these once-futuristic pieces of plastic. While there seem to be voguish as well as nostalgic factors driving this interest in CDs among people younger than Napster, the phenomenon is also a reminder of how the original digital-audio medium’s influence has lingered into the streaming era. “The CD made indifference a viable consumer attitude,” wrote the anthropologist Eric Walter Rothenbuhler. CDs, after all, were the first physical format that listeners could practically ignore due to their slim size and near-perfect sound quality, priming audiences for an era of passive, portable consumption.
Throughout the pandemic, one reliable community for buying and selling CDs has been Discogs. A spokesperson for the online marketplace told me that CD sales via the site climbed to 3.7 million units last year, an 8.8 percent increase, and are on pace to remain steady in 2022. The first year of the pandemic was even bigger. In 2020, Discogs CD sales leaped 37 percent, to 3.4 million units, while vinyl jumped 41 percent to 12 million. On this major hub for record collectors, at least, the CD has been back.
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Record stores similarly express measured optimism about the format. CD sales are up around 15 percent at Newbury Comics, says Carl Mello, director of brand engagement for the independently owned New England music chain. But he adds that 70 percent of Newbury’s CD sales currently are for K-pop titles, known for their ornate packaging and design. Unsurprisingly, artists who are already huge seem to be doing particularly well: Mello says Taylor Swift’s catalog titles are all selling two to five times better than last year, with similar increases for Kanye West, Ariana Grande, My Chemical Romance, the Strokes, and other boldfaced names. In a wild instance of technology folding in on itself, many young fans proudly display their CD collections on TikTok. “Just as vinyl TikTok is a thing, so is CD TikTok,” Mello notes.
Other record stores are also slinging jewel cases like it’s 1999. Elsewhere in New England, Bull Moose saw sales of new and used CDs surge 20 percent last year, says Chris Brown, CFO of the Portland, Maine-based indie chain. “People shouldn’t dismiss the 1 percent growth,” he observes. “That’s huge after several years of declines.”
Jim Henderson, co-owner of California independent chain Amoeba Music, points out that a plunge in used CD prices means that some classic albums are available in the format for as little as $4 to $5. “At Amoeba we never saw a stark drop-off in interest in CDs, just some lighter years as the spotlight shifted to LPs,” Henderson says. “We expected less interest than ever coming out of the pandemic quarantine period, where streaming and vinyl sales spiked. But it really hasn’t played out that way.” Also keeping the format commercially relevant is the decision by artists like Olivia Rodrigo, J. Cole, and Silk Sonic to push out their CD releases ahead of vinyl backlogs.
Although millennials may have soured on CDs during the 2000s, the format has devotees among Gen Z. Andrea Cacho, a 20-year-old sophomore at New York University, tells me that she and her friends are “on the CD wave.” Cacho, a WNYU DJ from Puerto Rico, says she bought her first CD—a used copy of New York City indie-rock band New Wet Kojak’s 1995 debut—a year ago, after arriving at school. She now has 62 CDs spanning punk, metal, screamo, pop, and Christian music. She typically buys her discs from the used bin at Generation Records in Greenwich Village for as little as a quarter (though Green Day’s Dookie cost her $10). “I was tired of discovering music through YouTube or Spotify,” Cacho tells me. “I wanted to be surprised.”
To play them, she first bought a cheap Walkman at Walmart, then upgraded to a Studebaker radio with a CD player. “Most of my friends who started getting CDs don’t even have a means of playing them,” she laughs. “So sometimes they’re like, ‘Yeah, can I come over and use your radio?’.
I think that there is a lot of positivity to be taken from the news CD sales have increased. They are selling across various generations, not only those who have grown up around them. Whilst there may be more affection and focus from those of a certain age, the albums they are buying are not only older ones. New albums are being bought on CD. Vinyl is great, though it lacks a certain portability. You cannot listen o vinyl on the go or enjoy it in the same way. Cassettes are also really cool, but fewer people have players and listen to them in the car. A lot of people still have CD players in their cars and stereos in their houses where they can play CDs. Also, older technology like Discmans are being dug out. I do feel there will be a boom in the production of Walkmans and Discmans. Maybe not reviving the old models – you only need to look at auction sites to see how much original Walkmans go for! -, it would be awesome if there was a new model of Discman. One disadvantage of the CD is that is would skip and stop when you played it in a Discman. The discs themselves can be fragile and only need to be lightly dropped on a carpeted area before they are scratched and smudged! If labels could ensure that more profit and revenue go to artists (compared to streaming), then I think people will naturally buy more CDs, vinyl and cassettes – as they want to feel like the artists are getting deserved payment.
IN THIS IMAGE: A Sony Discman/IMAGE CREDIT: Behance
Rather than it being a nostalgia kick, a modern update of Sony’s Discman and Walkman could draw in more listeners and buyers. I would definitely be interested, as so many artists put out their albums on CD and cassette. I know there are models available, though something that could maybe play both CDs and cassettes would be a bonus. I think there are disadvantages to the CD that need addressing so they can be calibrated in readiness for a sales boom. Apart from the fragility of them – which I am sure could be corrected when CDs are pressed – there is the environmental cost. A lot of new albums are still coming out with plastic cases. Maybe cardboard equivalents are not quite as sturdy and desirable, though every physical format needs to be conscious of its carbon footprint. The plastic waste generated by CD cases could be huge. Of course, most people will keep the cases and CDs, but there will be a day when they’ll be disposed of. Maybe a new material that is less bendable and vulnerable than cardboard could make an attractive casing. If the cost of an album could be kept reasonable, then I would not be surprised if the sales of CDs kept going up. I definitely don’t think we are in a position where they are threatened with extinction or becoming obsolete. New generations are going to discover them, and there is a massive sector who will always favour physical music.
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I love the idea of new-designed CD and cassette players that would beckon more buyers and making listening on the move easier. Some may say that it is more cost-effective and less burdensome streaming songs and listening that way. I am not suggesting one would be walking around with a massive bag of CDs and cassettes! Instead, they would take a few with them. The physical sales boom can be explained by a desire to listen to albums in full and in sequence. You can skip tracks listening to a CD album, but there is something nice about a complete album you have bought that you can also pass down to someone else. If future generations are going to preserve and enjoy great albums, then it is unlikely to be via digital methods. The act of physically handing music down is invaluable and precious. All this being said, this will not equate to a massive rise in CD sales. Instead, the trend will go upwards for a little while before flattering out. Even so, that does mean that production will continue unabated. Record shops are still going to keep CDs alive, and there is attractiveness beyond nostalgia that means this forty-year-plus technology keeps going on. If we can sort out the environmental issues and introduce a new line of CD players, that would go a long way. There was a lot of positivity around the recent news of CD sales going up. Maybe not a complete revival, it does signal things moving in the right direction. That is always…
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ENCOURAGING to see.