Will CDs have a resurgence like vinyl did?

[Martin Van Buren Stan]

I bought about 40 CDs today, from charity shops and record shops. The most I spent on an individual disc was £3.99 and the whole lot cost about £60. If I bought those albums on vinyl from the same shops it would have cost about £600-800 I reckon.

I'm considering selling all my records and using the money to buy a great CD player / speakers. I think I could get about £2k for the lot and even if I used half of it for a holiday £1k would buy a hell of a sound system wouldn't it?  I know this shouldn't be a major factor in my decision but do you reckon used CDs will ever skyrocket in price, like vinyl probably did over the last 10-20 years?

CDs are better than vinyl anyway aren't they? Sound better. Cheaper, and they don't fucking break just because you look at them funny or use them as a coaster.

[dontpaintyourteeth]

I think it's unlikely but you never know I guess. Tapes seem to be a thing now as well as vinyl, don't they? Albeit on a smaller scale.

I've gotten well into buying CDs again recently. Got a big pile of those Naxos classical CDs (Penderecki/Messiaen/Pärt/Stravinsky etc)for a score a couple of days ago. Vinyl is preposterously expensive now, innit.

[M-CORP]

Yeah but you can't con people into buying CDs in 52 gazillion different colours for hundreds of pounds like you can vinyl. And the crackles remind me of a camping holiday I had in the pouring rain when I got struck by lightning, ah nostalgia.

Seriously though, I'm a CD head too, I do have a few vinyl discs but they don't sound better than CD so I only go for vinyl if that's the only option or the material suits that format best.
I like paying half as much for something that doesn't take up so much space, especially as I move around a bit and listen to music on my phone most of the time. There's been a few columns popping up recently talking about why a CD revival would be both a possibility and a good thing in light of vinyl's current production problems, Rolling Stone and the Guardian have a few good pieces. Music industry seems dead set against it though. I personally don't like how the music industry's kind of left all physical media apart from vinyl behind, it feels like they're conning people into giving them more money sometimes.

But yeah sounds like a good plan

[Sebastian Cobb]

The cassette resurgence is baffling in that it is but it isn't; if you give me the option of paying about 2 quid extra for a trinket versus an mp3 then, yeah, I'll probably take that. I guess I bought cd's when an mp3 would do as well and still have the discs but haven't bought them a while thanks to vinyl purchases and streaming.

For whatever people whinge about vinyl and how much gets played once or twice, if at all then discarded tapes much be worse. As far as I know it's pretty hard to get ok tape formulation these days and half the new decks aren't just poor mechanisms, but also mono for no apparent reason.

I'm not sure how cassettes even got propped up economically; I know prisons kept them alive in the west, and I suspect the third world might've sustained them for a long time but I think mass market tape requires duplicators and stuff that's way more effort than pressing a CD and I'm willing to guess a cheap and nasty tape mech is more convoluted than a cheap and nasty CD player these days just due to economies of scale.

I never tossed my cd's and won't. Most formats I tossed I regret, including VHS, original xbox (when collecting older systems).

[lazarou]

I could definitely see it happening. Doesn't quite have the romantic factor of vinyl but you still do get the appeal of committing to a distinct album on a listen, owning a collection etc. The major advantage they have over cassette there is that CDs generally sound great on even fairly cheap gear whereas it's not really possible to buy a decent cassette player anymore (as viewers of channels like Techmoan are probably already aware, more or less all tape players still on the market use the same shitty Tanashin knock-offs for their cassette mechanisms because they're the only ones available).

IMO the smart move would be to follow the kpop market in this case, who have been very successfully selling silly amounts of CDs to people who almost never play them for years. Almost every release gets the deluxe treatment and in most cases is more like a hardback photobook that happens to come with a CD.

[purlieu]

Yeah, the industry is dead against CDs, despite the fact that they currently sell (in the UK, at least) as much as vinyl, tape and downloads combined. Every time an album does really well there's a press release stating that it sold so-and-so thousand copies, including 4,000 on vinyl (at least half of which were collectors buying multiple coloured versions), handily ignoring the fact that it sold about 10,000 CDs. Seems to cover a fair old range of artists, too. When I point out that CDs are the most popular format to buy, I often get a reply of "yeah but it's just people buying Adele and Ed Sheeran in the supermarket" but from the stats given out last year, yes, Abba's new album mostly sold CDs, but so did the Manics. Colin Newman has mentioned on the Pink Flag forum that the vast majority of Wire albums are sold on CD, and Brian of FSOL has mentioned the same to me for FSOLDigital (to the extent that they still do CD-only releases sometimes). When it comes to more ambient-leaning music, as well as more experimental sound-design kind of stuff, there are a huge number of CD- and CDr-only labels out there. It's actually rare that a label who can afford to do multiple formats won't put out a CD version. I've been expecting my purchases to gradually shift to vinyl out of necessity for about a decade now and I'm still only buying a very small number of LPs a year because most labels still seem to cater for CD buyers.

But it's all about the hype and clickbait, really - Magazine articles stating that "vinyl outsells CD for the first time in 20 years!" when they actually mean the format draws in more money, because back catalogue LPs sell for about seven times the price of back catalogue CDs - and a vocal minority of Discogs users who post on every CD-only release saying "this deserves a vinyl release" or even "I refuse to buy this on CD!", as if the amount of love and passion and creativity that's gone into a piece of music is worthless until it's been pressed into a particular type of plastic. The epitome of this is people demanding a vinyl edition of Brian Eno's Thursday Afternoon, an album that was the first album specifically created for CD, utilising its extended runtime. And Lorde releasing her last album as a download code in a box for environmental reasons, but still doing multiple coloured vinyl editions.

I actually do like vinyl, but I really hate the fetishism around it - labels promoting a record as the artist's "first album" because their previous releases have been on tapes, as if that makes them musically inferior - especially given it's kind of problematic. Not only is PVC generally considered one of the most toxic forms of plastic (and Benn Jordan's now widely quoted video suggests this might pass on to you, not just the environment and the workers in factories that produce it), but as a format it's expensive and takes up a lot of space. I once got into an argument with someone on a Facebook post about one of the aforementioned FSOL CD-only releases, the guy saying that actual music fans only listen to vinyl and anyone who buys digital formats is an idiot. Strangely enough, he mostly seemed to have fairly decent social justice type posts on his profile, so I handily pointed out to him that with the rising cost of living, as well as housing/rent, vinyl is generally a luxury for those on high wages with big properties. I couldn't afford more than a quarter of my musical purchases if I was buying vinyl, and would have nowhere to put them. Not to mention the fact that we were discussing a release that was presented as a single, hour-long gapless mix CD. I can't fathom how anyone thinks putting gaps in heavily immersive ambient-leaning music is in any way a benefit. Yes, a classic 38 minute rock album can probably be enjoyed on a deeper cultural level by playing it on the format most closely associated with the history of that kind of music, but wanting a digitally mixed and mastered gapless 60 minute release intended for CD on vinyl is just posturing, really. The other issue with vinyl is that it's become elitist for artists and labels, too, with increasing prices and lead times.

I'm a creature of habit, really, which is why I still have CDs. I've tried shifting to digital, and I end up feeling overwhelmed, and end up missing the option of browsing my shelves, picking out an album and popping it in my player. It's not even really about the artwork much these days (most new albums have almost nothing in the way of liner notes or design, frequently just a gatefold digisleeve with a font cover, tracklist, credits page and nothing else), it's simply me being autistic and not feeling comfortable shifting the way I go about my obsessive interest. While vinyl is definitely nice to own - I do love the things themselves, and their large art - and CD is probably a better listening experience, I am genuinely baffled by anyone born this century who bothers owning physical copies. I've seen people (generally those even more stuck in their ways than I am, ie commenters on superdeluxeedition.com) suggest that people who buy downloads and stream aren't even 'proper music fans', which is an attitude I hate. For all but the most hardcore, vinyl, tape and CD were only ever functional, and files and streaming offer exactly the same experience. My girlfriend has copies of many of her favourite albums, but 99% of her listening is done through Tidal, and she's a massive music obsessive.

Will CD have a resurgence? Sales went up in the UK last year, which is something. The vinyl manufacturing issues these days mean that even major labels are having to put releases back by a week or two, but independents are having utterly ludicrous issues - several I follow have had to put their release dates back month after month, time after time, having already waited nine months or more. Important Records posted about this last year, saying they were going to be doing more CD releases as they've been quoted manufacturing times of more than a year; one follower responded with "I'd rather wait that long to get it on vinyl," which struck me as pretty selfish: that's an entire year the label and artist are expected to wait before they can begin to see any payment. It's actually no feasible for a lot of people to consider releasing vinyl now, as it pretty much puts a halt to regular releases and thus regular income. So I think there will be an increase in CD releases, purely because of this. Whether they'll become fashionable or not remains to be seen. The vaporwave scene, which itself fetishised the image of CDs, them included in a lot of artwork, seems to loathe the format, with tapes and vinyl selling out in minutes but CDs remaining in stock for months. I suppose they're still seen as too mainstream - the 'Adele and Ed Sheeran' issue again - to be fully embraced by any alternative/underground culture yet. But as the cassette revival grew out of the underground tape scene, in which they were largely used because they were the most affordable format, the same could happen again. It's now more expensive to get cassettes professionally made than CDs in the UK.

The Kpop thing is a good point. East Asia is still CD-dominated, accounting for 70% of all music listening in Japan and hence things like the high quality mini LP sleeves, Blu Spec CDs, exclusive bonus tracks etc.

You have been listening to a public service announcement by CaB's biggest supported of the Compact Disc.

I'm not sure how cassettes even got propped up economically; I know prisons kept them alive in the west, and I suspect the third world might've sustained them for a long time but I think mass market tape requires duplicators and stuff that's way more effort than pressing a CD and I'm willing to guess a cheap and nasty tape mech is more convoluted than a cheap and nasty CD player these days just due to economies of scale.

Underground/DIY scenes, particularly noise and black metal, kept tapes going. They were always DIY and this existed long before CDrs, so they became a part of the culture really. Especially as the music is generally both lo-fi, suiting the medium, and analogue, with tapes being a cheap alternative to vinyl. In the mid '00s, some noise artists and labels began moving into new age synth territory (still no idea how this happened - ask Emeralds, Oneohtrix Point Never and Pulse Emitter, I suppose) and the tapes went with them, until they began to become the defacto format for DIY experimental/electronic labels. They still are in a lot of ways - I released an album last year on tape and it sold out really quickly and got a lot of hype and reviews. I released another album on the same label this year, but on CD, and it's been largely ignored.
It mostly came from the US, where tape duplicators and decks are very easy to find in 'thrift stores', because I don't think they have an equivalent of PAT testing. I've never seen a duplicator in a charity shop here, but I remember when I used to post on noise and experimental music boards and Americans were always posting photos of ones they'd found for a tenner or something. Until labels started properly embracing Bandcamp in the early 2010s, these would be completely tape-only releases, no digital, so there were enough players and enough people playing the tapes to go round.
Of course, as with everything, underground things got co-opted by the mainstream - and vaporwave was a very big factor in this - and suddenly tapes are cool again. I have no doubt that the majority of your weirdo DIY tapes of sound collages released in runs of 35 are genuinely listened to, but I would imagine most big releases are just seen as collectibles.

[dontpaintyourteeth]

I used to work with someone who didn't think owning an album on cd counted as actually owning it. What a dum-dum.

[Brundle-Fly]

I hope so as it might be my pension.

[Campbell Soupe]

I hope so too, got hundreds of the things and I'm quite looking forward to becoming a "hipster".

[Sebastian Cobb]

It mostly came from the US, where tape duplicators and decks are very easy to find in 'thrift stores', because I don't think they have an equivalent of PAT testing. I've never seen a duplicator in a charity shop here, but I remember when I used to post on noise and experimental music boards and Americans were always posting photos of ones they'd found for a tenner or something. Until labels started properly embracing Bandcamp in the early 2010s, these would be completely tape-only releases, no digital, so there were enough players and enough people playing the tapes to go round.
Of course, as with everything, underground things got co-opted by the mainstream - and vaporwave was a very big factor in this - and suddenly tapes are cool again. I have no doubt that the majority of your weirdo DIY tapes of sound collages released in runs of 35 are genuinely listened to, but I would imagine most big releases are just seen as collectibles.

I've not seen duplicators for sale ever. I was thinking of trying to pick up a portastudio for fucking about making some drone stuff because despite not making music or knowing much, I have an alesis micron a pal left lying around that I thought I could put to use (and don't really want to muck around with software - i use a computer all day so want something tangible to fiddle with). But a quick skirt of gumtree and ebay told me if I knew how to make actual music I could buy a far more fancy digital porta with 8 concurrent track recording, that could do 24 tracks with multiple passes, or if I just wanted tape to add colour - a far more interesting tape echo device for around the cost they command now, so I guess only purists are using such things, rather than taking advantage of digital multitrack/daws and bouncing through tape for the colour/saturation.

I picked this bastard off gumtree a few weeks ago though. I did make sure it made noise and lit up when I checked it out but it wans't until I got it home I realised it played bright for about half a second before dulling up, I'd already swabbed it with isop by that point but a good shine with a torch showed more deposits on the capstan and corresponding stripes on the pinch roller so I bought replacement belts and rollers from Portugal for a tenner. I found a good service summary for a posher model from the same line.



Interested to see if dolbyc/hxpro makes any difference really. My memories of tapes are that they were terrible but that's largely because I had a philips boom box which had horrid tape hiss without a tape present or even on rewind/ff despite allegedly having dolby nr. But that was at the tail-end of tape I think. My old man had an older JVC 'biphonic' box with led vu's, switchable dolby/chrome and I don't recall that hissing like mad.

This is supposed to be about cd's innit? Most of mine (about 300 I guess?) are in boxes since I last moved a good few years ago, I'd ripped them all by that point, but rarely use the rips as it's easier to steam them. I've got 20 or so sat next to my stereo that I play occasionally because I do like the tangibility of it, and I think my cd player might sound nicer than a stream but I dunno if that's true, I certainly wouldn't notice unless I was concentrating and would zone out very quick if so.

[Pauline Walnuts]

OOh, I had that Yamaha tape decks, stopped working, probably due to the belts, I do regret chucking it away, now I've seen how much they're going for now.

[sutin]

If they suddenly become worth something i'll never have to work another day in my life.

[The Mollusk]

If they suddenly become worth something i'll never have to work another day in my life.

Really? How big is your collection?! I've got roughly 1200 and even if every one of those suddenly reached £30 in second hand value that's still only £36,000.

[Johnboy]

I'd say they'll get more popular yes.

At the moment t's the golden age of charity shop CD finds - fill yer boots.

[holyzombiejesus]

Yeah but you can't con people into buying CDs in 52 gazillion different colours for hundreds of pounds like you can vinyl.

Want a bet?



£80

[Pink Gregory]

Yeah I've really scaled back on my record buying since I was first entranced years ago.  What really slowed me down was my favourite record shop closing down, nothing's felt the same since, anywhere that sells new stuff is packed to the brim with £30 180g reissues and anywhere that sells old stuff is £20 minimum for anything that would actually be good to listen to.  Days of being pleasantly surprised to find a copy of Joni Mitchell's Mingus for £12 are gone.

I keep up with a few artists' releases, and there's a small label putting out stuff that I'm willing to take a flutter if the writeup is good.  Picked up LPs Sign o' the Times and Simon & Garfunkel's Concert in Central Park at a little market in Stratford Upon Avon and that got a bit of the magic back, but it's rare.   

Everything else is CD.  Long live the digipak, honestly.

[Sebastian Cobb]

I'd say they'll get more popular yes.

At the moment t's the golden age of charity shop CD finds - fill yer boots.

A few years ago, another grand source of bargains were bots under bidding each other on amazon. Zoverstocks was music magpie I think. There's only so many copies of Music for the Jilted Generation or Exit Planet Dust they can feasibly need so they pap the rest off back to the marketplace for a penny plus postage.

[Pink Gregory]

A few years ago, another grand source of bargains were bots under bidding each other on amazon. Zoverstocks was music magpie I think.

Ms. Gregory has been having a great time with Music Magpie; just albums showing up at the door every other day, "it was four quid"

[purlieu]

Not sure if Music Magpie still flog their excess to PoundLand or not but Asda stock them now too. Admittedly it's mostly Natalie Imbruglia and landfill indie, but sometimes there's something interesting in there. I replaced a scratched copy of FSOL's ISDN from Poundland a few years ago.

[Capt.Midnight]

Minidisc was a super cool format. I'd love a Minidisc revival. However, not many people have a spare minidisc player lying about...

Looks like the website is still thriving - https://www.minidisc.org/

[purlieu]

There have been a fair few MiniDisc releases in the past few years, once again vaporwave the main source, although they've filtered out to other DIY labels too. Sadly they're just in those little square cases that blank MDs came in rather than the big chunky cassette-sized boxes.
They really are a novelty thing, though. Tapes survived as a niche thing and have their own sound as well as nostalgia, whereas MiniDiscs were never more than a tiny niche in the first place and don't offer anything that CDs don't other than subtly inferior sound quality.

I do get people wanting to own something unique or nice in relation to music, but I don't half miss the days when people bought a physical copy because simply because it was how they played music. I do wonder how much plastic would be saved if people stopped buying four different coloured vinyl editions of an album, or LPs to stick in a frame, or CDs to rip to the computer never to be looked at again, or tapes and MDs they don't even have a player for. It doesn't half feel like a waste.

[dontpaintyourteeth]

The plastic thing is a fair point but is streaming any better for the environment? (That's an actual question)

Does anyone else still use slsk? I like having my own little library. Fuck Spotify, tbh

[SpiderChrist]

Minidisc was a super cool format. I'd love a Minidisc revival. However, not many people have a spare minidisc player lying about...

Looks like the website is still thriving - https://www.minidisc.org/

Found a couple of 5 packs of blank Minidiscs just yesterday. Other than making some nice compilations for myself, I'm not sure what to do with them.

Still use slsk too.

[Sebastian Cobb]

I loved my minidisc player as well. Really did a good job of consolidating the best of both CD and tape. But once mp3 players adopted hard drives and were the size of a pack of cigs it's no wonder it was game over.

Those new md releases are essentially burned to consumer writable md's, originally general release md's were pressed and only had a window on the bottom side. I only ever owned one of them. Moby's Play, which sort of sums up the era perfectly.

[monkfromhavana]

If you want a physical product, why not just stick the album on a nicely boxed memory stick with loads of extras on and flog that. Think I'd rather than than tapes/CDs

[purlieu]

Physical vs streaming is an interesting one in terms of environmental impact. I've seen things saying if you listen to an album more than so many times (22 or something?) then streaming is worse than vinyl, but then it's been countered by people pointing out that server usage and such is dynamic and thus the more you stream an album, the less energy it uses or... something? I'm sure someone will be able to answer better.

Either way, buying an album you don't actually play still has to be the worst option of all, environmentally. And the best is downloads. I was surprised to discover that not only are download sales much lower than CDs, but they're falling at a faster rate.

I have my entire music collection on my computer in lossless as well as my physical collection. I do think downloads are the most sensible option, even if I can't get past the psychological block of not physically owning the album myself.

[purlieu]

If you want a physical product, why not just stick the album on a nicely boxed memory stick with loads of extras on and flog that. Think I'd rather than than tapes/CDs

Memory sticks were a thing for a short time, although as someone who's never owned any modern hi-fi or home cinema gear, I was never sure how you play them. It can't be a matter of sticking it in your computer and selecting the files, surely, otherwise that's the worst of both worlds.

It's one of those formats that had a potential future that was made redundant by easily available broadband. The same as DVD and BluRay albums. You still get them for super deluxe boxes and stuff, but the option of much longer albums with extras didn't really catch on because it came too late. I did a trilogy of albums a few years ago and keep thinking I'll do a DVD reissue so they can be listened to as one. Sadly not convinced the market is there for it.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Physical vs streaming is an interesting one in terms of environmental impact. I've seen things saying if you listen to an album more than so many times (22 or something?) then streaming is worse than vinyl, but then it's been countered by people pointing out that server usage and such is dynamic and thus the more you stream an album, the less energy it uses or... something? I'm sure someone will be able to answer better.

I think a lot of these are built on poor assumptions, based on archaic raw power usage, and more subtle things like local caching (as you touch on) and dynamic scaling of the services themselves.

Someone did an in-depth study of video streaming and concluded netflix et al used 'modest' levels of power and the biggest chunk of energy was invariably the display you watch it on. Of course streaming an album uses orders of magnitude less data (and by association less energy).

https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-carbon-footprint-of-streaming-video-fact-checking-the-headlines

[Sebastian Cobb]

If you want a physical product, why not just stick the album on a nicely boxed memory stick with loads of extras on and flog that. Think I'd rather than than tapes/CDs

Because it's e-waste in waiting and kind of more of a pain in the arse than a CD (sure people don't have drives these days, but people also live just on phones so buying an adaptor just to read a stick once?)? A download code would be more convenient and portable but then you've got to trust people not to take it down.

[Sebastian Cobb]

The plastic thing is a fair point but is streaming any better for the environment? (That's an actual question)

Does anyone else still use slsk? I like having my own little library. Fuck Spotify, tbh

Infrastructure dedicated to serving shitloads of people at once concurrently versus maintaining your own version of that just for you?

Streaming uses loads of energy collectively but typically it's like district heating versus individual boilers.