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CD sales growth outpaced vinyl in the first half of 2026

consequence.net

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Re: CD sales growth outpaced vinyl in the first half of 2026

#31

Post by justsomehnguy »

mrpippy wrote: post #25
tangenter wrote: post #9

Personally, I haven’t stopped buying CDs or in certain cases DVDs and Blu-Rays - not of movies but of music. I find it interesting these “went away” but I can see why: nobody I know has a cd player to begin with. A lot of laptops nowadays don’t come with disc trays, and nobody buys a dvd bluray player. Yes, the PS or Xbox can play it but everyone just streams movies or music. So somewhere along the way it disappeared…

For some reason, the PS4 and PS5 actually cannot play audio CDs

If true this is quite ironic because being able to be a media centre for a household is what propelled the sales of PS1 and PS2.

Re: CD sales growth outpaced vinyl in the first half of 2026

#32

Post by [deleted] »

mrob wrote: post #7
Rooster61 wrote: post #4

While I'm thrilled that kids are experiencing the thrill of buying physical media, I'm not sure CD's are the best way to go. Most of my CD's from my teenage years are no longer playable (partially due to poor upkeep, but some literally from disc rot). But hey, they'll learn the same lesson in a couple of decades haha. I've personally been buying vinyl both because of the fact I missed out on the excitement myself gro…

I have hundreds of CDs from the 80s and 90s, most of them bought used from charity shops. The vast majority play perfectly, despite some of them having obvious signs of poor storage/handling. I think it's more likely your CD player is failing than your CDs.

[deleted]

Re: CD sales growth outpaced vinyl in the first half of 2026

#33

Post by netsharc »

throw0101d wrote: post #29
l72 wrote: post #16

A friend in his 40s had a 90s birthday party so I burned some mix CDs as party favors. Those CDrs were 20 years old and have been sitting in a hot, humid attic for the last 10+ years, but still recorded fine. The real problem was almost no one had a CD player not even in their car! Also, I don’t think k3b or any of the other software i tried has been updated since 2005, but it all still worked great! Most importantly…

> The real problem was almost no one had a CD player not even in their car! And here I am driving a 2003 Golf with a tape deck (and CD player).

My car reads USB sticks with MP3s on them (I was telling a Gen-Z colleague this and felt old...). There are external BluRay drives that connect via USB, but then to he able to play audio CDs, either the car needs to understand CDDA, or the drive needs to understand CDDA and pretend to be a FAT32 filesystem of some MP3s (or... WAVs?) to the car.

Huh I also have Subsonic on my home NAS and Symfonium on my phone (connectable via Android Auto). Another Rube Goldberg invention would be to put the audio CD in the drive connected to the NAS, have a driver that pretends to be a filesystem of MP3s but actually encodes the CD tracks (on the fly on every playback, of course!), stream it over the Internet to my phone, that's connected to Android Auto. That's how to play a CD on a modern car!

Re: CD sales growth outpaced vinyl in the first half of 2026

#34

Post by sperr11 »

justsomehnguy wrote: post #31
mrpippy wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some reason, the PS4 and PS5 actually cannot play audio CDs

If true this is quite ironic because being able to be a media centre for a household is what propelled the sales of PS1 and PS2.

This is also what pushed me to get a PS3 later in its lifetime : getting a game console, CD player and DVD + Blu-Ray player all in one box was pretty convenient.

Re: CD sales growth outpaced vinyl in the first half of 2026

#35

Post by netsharc »

justsomehnguy wrote: post #31
mrpippy wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some reason, the PS4 and PS5 actually cannot play audio CDs

If true this is quite ironic because being able to be a media centre for a household is what propelled the sales of PS1 and PS2.

The bigger irony is that Sony and Philips worked together to create the CD-Audio specification.

Re: CD sales growth outpaced vinyl in the first half of 2026

#36

Post by justsomehnguy »

sperr11 wrote: post #34
justsomehnguy wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If true this is quite ironic because being able to be a media centre for a household is what propelled the sales of PS1 and PS2.

This is also what pushed me to get a PS3 later in its lifetime : getting a game console, CD player and DVD + Blu-Ray player all in one box was pretty convenient.

And killed HD-DVD in the process, hehe.

Re: CD sales growth outpaced vinyl in the first half of 2026

#37

Post by arthurjj »

cdrnsf wrote: post #18

Buy CDs, buy vinyl, buy merch, go see shows — support artists instead of platforms and middlemen wherever you can. This is a welcome trend.

I try to buy as many shirts as possible from bands I like and this post reminded me to go look again. I listen to a lot of metal and punk and the problem is most the shirts are either black, which overheat you in SoCal, or have designs that are aggressively ugly [1].

I wish more bands hired better designers or at least had shirts I wouldn't overheat in

[1] I own and wear this one so it's not always a deal breaker https://merchbar.imgix.net/product/174/7292/6127313518766/Zs...

Re: CD sales growth outpaced vinyl in the first half of 2026

#38

Post by piskov »

l72 wrote: post #16

A friend in his 40s had a 90s birthday party so I burned some mix CDs as party favors. Those CDrs were 20 years old and have been sitting in a hot, humid attic for the last 10+ years, but still recorded fine. The real problem was almost no one had a CD player not even in their car! Also, I don’t think k3b or any of the other software i tried has been updated since 2005, but it all still worked great! Most importantly…

However if you’ve tried to read those cd-rw after 20-30 years, they would most likely be corrupted.

Factory stampted cds are better in this regard

Re: CD sales growth outpaced vinyl in the first half of 2026

#39

Post by q7xvh97o2pDhNrh »

throw0101d wrote: post #29
l72 wrote: post #16

A friend in his 40s had a 90s birthday party so I burned some mix CDs as party favors. Those CDrs were 20 years old and have been sitting in a hot, humid attic for the last 10+ years, but still recorded fine. The real problem was almost no one had a CD player not even in their car! Also, I don’t think k3b or any of the other software i tried has been updated since 2005, but it all still worked great! Most importantly…

> The real problem was almost no one had a CD player not even in their car! And here I am driving a 2003 Golf with a tape deck (and CD player).

> And here I am driving a 2003 Golf with a tape deck (and CD player).

That sounds wonderful.

There was a brief, magical moment in history when cars would come with AM/FM radio, a tape deck, a CD player, and an aux port so that you could plug in audio from every other device that humanity would invent for the rest of time.

It feels like the most fleeting of moments, and it was so long ago. Maybe it was just one summer afternoon in the early 2000s.

Anyway, I think we've largely been going downhill since then. For whatever reason, humanity achieved a lovely little peak of engineering, and then we immediately abandoned it for worse options.

Re: CD sales growth outpaced vinyl in the first half of 2026

#40

Post by bloomca »

I have a sizeable collection of CDs and during last year wrote my own CD reader and a ripper CLI.

As ridiculous as it sounds, but there is some intent in doing all of that and listening to the files on your hard drive. We have a vynil/CD player as well, but they are not at my workplace.

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