Why play a music CD? No ads, no privacy terrors, no algorithms

I honestly prefer Spotify. The reality is that I have 1014 songs on my playlist at the time of writing, and it sets me back the equivalent of about $5 PM (Converted from ZAR), and I get to be picky about what I listen to frequently. In an album from someone, odds are that I might like 2 of the songs at most, so buying a CD for only 2 songs is a pointless activity for me.

This means that to collect 1000 songs that I like on CD I'll have to buy 500 CDS total. That's a lot of money.

I also enjoy being able to mix up my music and not having to swap out discs when I get tired of an artist. I understand privacy is an issue for some, but I don't really care if Spotify collects the data of who I listen to, it only improves their algorithm and makes my music discoveries easier.

The reality is that you're always connected to the internet, and even if you listen to CDs on your computer the media player is still collecting your data and behaviour.

I came here to mention exactly this and am glad to see it at the top.

I, as a teenager bought a Sony BMG album with this rootkit.

At the time I didn't own a standalone music player, just my PC. I had a nice Creative sound card and some decent speakers, and an appreciation for audio quality.

To my surprise I found that the Sony album prevented you from playing back anything but some low-quality 128Kb MP3s stored in that data portion of the Disc if using a PC and there was zero chance I was allowing their crapware onto my machine.

I contacted them and they sent me out a replacement disc without the root-kit data rubbish but only upon me first posting back my own disc, without its case no less.

Apple Music has a whole bunch of Henry Cow. No King Crimson though.

A standard Red Book audio CD cannot install malware to your system. It was the data CD with music that Sony shipped made it possible.

This is why, I, sometimes a CD buyer, believe all listeners of Audio CD should try maintaining the status quo of CD, as defined by the Red Book, and resist/boycott any attempt by the industry to "make a better CD" (e.g. SACD, Audio DVD, Audio Bluray), or "add more functionalities" to the existing CD standards.

Technologically, I would be happy to see a Doubly 5.1 Bluray Audio CD playing at living room from my surrounding speakers (better channel separation allows improvements of sound reproduction even on speakers of moderate quality), or CDs with real filesystem and error correction (an Audio CD by its original design, only streams music in real time, as if it's a digital LP track. There is no way to even know if the data you've just read from the disc is correct or not [0]), or a FLAC-encoded stereo CD (it would allow 30% more songs to be recorded on a single CD).

However, I'd better to live without them, as history has shown: all the newer standards would definitely be more "consumer-unfriendly" at best (go to any AV forum, and see the compatibility issues caused by HDCP [1] for example...), and malware at worst. The Audio CD, even with its historical limitations, is good enough, it plays lossless music with 44100 kHz sampling rate, and it did/does this job well.

Also, you may have noticed the recent renaissance of LP discs, and some LP lovers' arguments of how analog has better sound quality. While I don't believe those arguments are persuasive, I'm highly supportive of the LP industry for the same reason - you cannot install malware on a LP disc.

[0] Why I Ripped the Same CD 300 Times

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17649374

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1689823

wasn't it a thing, that you could bypass this by holding shift (to disable autoplay) when inserting the disc?