The CD revival is real

“SPOTIFY IS is disgusting,” says Manuel Sanz, flipping through the CD racks at Reckless Records, the second-hand music shop that’s been an institution in London’s Soho since 1984. “If there’s a band I like, I buy the product.”

This morning, Sanz and his 12-year-old daughter are shopping for American punk CDs, specifically anything by the North Carolina group Polvo.

What happened to the vinyl revival? Wasn’t that all the rage?

“Vinyl is fine,” he says. “But I still have my CD collection from the 1990s. My player’s bust — you have to push the drawer closed — but it’s the easiest way to listen to stuff.”

Shop assistant Connor Winyard says Sanz is far from alone.

“When I first started working here, two years ago, it was 80-20 [per cent] vinyl-CDs,” he says. “Now it’s 50-50. I’ve been surprised.”

Winyard cites a few reasons. Chiefly, price. Vinyl might have spun its way back from the grave — more than 41 million EPs and LPs were sold in America last year, a 45-fold increase since 2006, the year given for vinyl’s comeback — but it came at a cost. To the customer. It didn’t take long for record companies to get back to their old premium-charging ways. Arctic Monkeys’ recent album The Car costs £28 on vinyl on Amazon. The “Lavender Edition” of Taylor Swift’s Midnights will set you back £35. And that’s before you get into the silly money charged for “heavyweight” vinyl repressings of classic rock — The Beatles’ The Singles Collection, for example, at £158. It’s not just the good stuff. Today there apparently exists a market for an 180-gram, coloured-vinyl edition of Ace of Base’s 1993 best-of, All That She Wants, to someone willing to pay £84.95 for it.

“You can pick up almost anything on CD for £4 or £5,” says Winyard. “People buying albums to play in the car is another reason.”

The much-trumpeted “warmer”, superior sound of vinyl doesn’t always hold sway.

“We don’t really hear our customers saying that,” says Winyard. “Maybe occasionally.”

It’s a similar story over at Rough Trade Soho, were we find a customer called Richard going through the jazz CDs.

“I’m looking for Donald Byrd,” he says. “I’ve got a list. If I can’t find it on vinyl I’ll get it on CD. Music is music. I don’t care how I listen to it. But I still collect it.”

Citing a digital backlash, the media has made the case for the revival of almost any analogue delivery system you care to mention — from shops dedicated solely to selling VHS cassettes, to masochists who swear by typewriters — but the CD resurgence is surprising for a few reasons.

One, the CD never really lost its sheen of Brothers In Arms-adjacent naffness, as lampooned by Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho. Two, even as the world raced to replace its vinyl collection like-for-like with the new-fangled format in the 1980s, everyone was complicit in the idea it was actually all a bit of a swizz. (Money for nothing, indeed.) Three, by general consensus the CD was the least-loved of all music formats — shiny polycarbonate discs that soon got separated from their plastic boxes, and whose case spindles and cover tabs had the habit of snapping off. Streaming saved us from all of that.

And yet here we are. Figures from 2022 suggest that revenues from CD sales have increased by 21 per cent, with the number of units sold up 47 per cent on the previous year. Sales are up for the first time since 2004. The resurgence has prompted high-end audio companies to reintroduce CD players to their line-ups.

“We’re always listening to our customers, and there’s a genuine demand for people wanting CD players to complement their ecosystems [ie: stereos],” says Stuart George, CEO of British hi-fi specialist Cambridge Audio, which has just launched its Evo CD player. “We had a great reaction to our [top-tier streaming system] Evo since we launched it two years ago, and there’s always the question ‘When’s the CD coming?’ ‘Can we get a CD player to go with it?’”

To George, CDs represent the best of both worlds. A robust-enough medium in which you can pick up a second-hand album in a charity shop for a couple of quid, and there’s every chance you’ll be able to enjoy it “as new”. And to ears used to the compressed audio of streaming platforms or YouTube, “you’re likely to be blown away by the quality of the sound you get”.

“There’s something really pleasurable about owning physical media, and the CD looks like a bargain now, doesn’t it?,” he says. “I was talking to a colleague who got rid of all his CDs to [pre-owned online retailer] Music Magpie and he’s starting to think ‘What did I do? I’ve made a terrible mistake.’”

There are younger people who’ve grown up never knowing a physical music format, and are now discovering an accessible way to start collecting. The CD turned 40 last year; its sales peaked in the year 2000. Tens of billions of discs were created during that time. Plenty of them are still out there, somewhere.

“As music fans you generally have a preference for good-quality music — as opposed to insisting it has to be on one format or another,” George says.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, over on the sub-Reddit r/CD_collectors, people are less ambivalent.

“Streaming music is a whole different thing for me than the ritual of picking one CD from my 1,500-disc library and listening it through the end [sic],” writes Muted_Land’782, in answer to the post “Does It At Times Feel Pointless To Buy Used CDs in 2023?”: “Nowadays I use streaming to discover new bands or to check out new releases before committing to buying it. I always loved owning stuff instead of ‘borrowing’ it.”

“Browsing shops for cheap and interesting CDs is more fun than browsing Spotify,” writes Incredible_Mr_R.

“I’m too cheap to pay a subscription [to a streaming service]. I also like to listen and not feel like there is some bot algorithm Big Brother guy listening in, judging, and trying to monetise the fact that I’m in a nostalgic mood and listened to an obscure song from 1987 15 times in a row yesterday,” says mylocker15.

“Also can we bring back iPods please. I bought a knock-off one but I miss organising on iTunes and moving whole playlists over.”

We’ll pencil that revival in for 2026. ○

This story originally appeared on Esquire UK.

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