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For a 40-year-old format that peaked in Y2K, the CD has sparked an awful lot of debate lately. In mid-January, Rolling Stone’s Rob Sheffield wrote an endearing love letter to compact discs, provocatively headlined “Jewel-Box Heroes: Why the CD Revival Is Finally Here.” Less than a week later, musician and writer Damon Krukowski offered a thoughtful counterpoint with a catchy title of its own: “There Is No CD Revival.” For music lovers trying to keep up, it might not only be the shiny plastic circles that are spinning.
Setting off this online brouhaha was a small but remarkable statistic: According to industry tracker MRC Data, CD sales rose last year for the first time since 2004. But the bump was only about 1 percent. Adele’s new album alone accounted for the entire uptick—two times over. Up until then, CD sales had fallen for 20 straight years, from an inflation-adjusted $19.9 billion in 2000 to $483.3 million in 2020, according to the RIAA. By comparison, vinyl sales have risen 15 straight years. Total spending on CDs is still less than half that of vinyl—let alone streaming, which accounted for 84 percent of recording industry revenue in the first half of 2021. So as the pandemic continues to hit artists’ touring income and the dominant streamer sides with a shock jock, any pronouncement of a CD revival seems understandably contentious.
Clearly, no one is saying that the compact disc will ever again have enough economic force to 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 hub 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 modern music collectors, at least, the CD has been back.
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?’”
Cacho is clear-eyed about how CDs fit into the current zeitgeist. “I feel like it definitely has to do with this trend of Y2K,” she says—a point echoed, and negated, by other young CD defenders. Janea Wilson, a 21-year-old Northwestern senior from Detroit, sees CDs growing more popular among her peers precisely because the format’s heyday is fashionable again. “Nostalgia dating from the late ’90s and early 2000s is just so in right now.” She recalls seeing tweets recently that asked why laptops don’t have DVD players anymore, why is it so hard to play CDs, and finding herself agreeing with the sentiment. “Who knows, we could end up back to lugging around cases of CDs.”
Payton Sellers, a 22-year-old senior at the University of Texas at Arlington, is already there. The campus online-radio show host says of her 400-disc collection, “I have three big cases full of CDs that I play all the time, whether it be doing school work, house work, or even just to lay on my bed and absorb the sound of the music coming through my speakers.”
Sarah Matthews, an art history major at Lawrence University, wrote an article for the student-run Lawrentian in February 2021 about the comfort to be found from childhood CDs during the pandemic. Matthews tells me that she wrote the piece when she was back living on campus but all of her classes were still online—“a really isolating feeling,” the 20-year-old junior explains. “When all your life is virtual, even looking on Spotify can seem like draining work.” Although Matthews doesn’t have a lot of CDs, she’s careful to clarify that her peers’ affection for the format is about more than fashion. “My generation isn’t only buying stuff because it looks cool,” she says. “Yes, we’re into vintage, nostalgic stuff. But people really, truly do like CDs.”
Matthews points out, though, that turntables are still more common and desired on campus than CD players. Wilson, the Northwestern senior, calls the CD “an in-between medium”: not as cheap or convenient as streaming but also distinct from collecting and listening to vinyl. She only owns about 10 CDs, but a couple of them are Japanese city pop compilations, like 2019’s Pacific Breeze. “They are curated so well that it’s not really something I would have been able to do on my own,” she says, laughing as she compares them to a playlist. It’s a fitting format for an homage to Japan, the most CD-loving country in the world.
The common theory that pop-culture nostalgia runs in roughly 20-year cycles has long suggested that a CD comeback would happen right about now, despite whatever advances in technology had come along. There’s a particular novelty in a generation remembering something that perhaps barely existed when they were kids. In 2010, sparked by my own reporting on the small-scale resurgence of cassettes, the critic Tom Ewing wrote a brilliant Pitchfork column in which he speculatively imagined a similar reemergence of “CD culture” years later. The fictitious publication date for Ewing’s piece: March 2022.
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