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CD sales growth outpaced vinyl in the first half of 2026

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

#91

Post by Acrobatic_Road »

dylan604 wrote: post #49
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.

There's a couple of artists that I would absolutely buy their vinyl except the shipping is more expensive than the vinyl. I've done it a couple of times for artists I really like and appreciate, but it is most definitely cost prohibitive. So it's pay their bandcamp prices for the digitals and streaming, but the physical media is just made in too limited quantities to be affordable by anyone but FAANG employees

I import a lot of stuff from Europe and the shipping is rough. I save by bundling items.

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

#92

Post by asciimov »

piskov wrote: post #38
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

Factory stamps are still not immune to bit rot, even when stored in ideal conditions.

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

#93

Post by dylan604 »

Acrobatic_Road wrote: post #91
dylan604 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a couple of artists that I would absolutely buy their vinyl except the shipping is more expensive than the vinyl. I've done it a couple of times for artists I really like and appreciate, but it is most definitely cost prohibitive. So it's pay their bandcamp prices for the digitals and streaming, but the physical media is just made in too limited quantities to be affordable by anyone but FAANG employees

I import a lot of stuff from Europe and the shipping is rough. I save by bundling items.

If only I could get the artists I like to release at the same time

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

#94

Post by dylan604 »

idiotsecant wrote: post #77
dylan604 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"For whatever reason, humanity achieved a lovely little peak of engineering, and then we immediately abandoned it for worse options." "I donno Bluetooth is pretty universal now" Your comment does not disagree with GP's in the way you think it does

I guess what I'm saying is 27 different media players duct taped together does not seem like the peak of engineering. A single wireless protocol seems pretty good.

Back in the day, we'd rate ourselves by how many dongles we'd string together to get things to work.

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

#95

Post by CamelCaseName »

ColdStream wrote: post #24

About 10 years back I figured that this was coming. CDs are the best of both worlds. Near perfect audio quality, not too big physically, cannot have the rights revoked, no subscription fees but really easy to rip and put on your phone or whatever. A few years back I saw some people buying collections of thousands of discs for maybe $100. Even if 10% of it was good, that was still a huge win. Those huge hauls are beco…

There are people who do this at scale, often reselling online. It's definitely for those who are truly passionate about it, and enjoy discovering new things.

I gave it a shot, and while profitable, just not for me at all.

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

#96

Post by msftgreed »

> CD sales surged 16% to 16.3 million units, soundly outpacing vinyl’s comparatively modest 2.4% growth.

Ok, but the lack of a unit on vinyl makes it very hard to have an apples to apples comparison here. If cds are selling 1000 units and vinyl is selling 1,000,000 units, those 16% and 2.4% numbers are pretty wildly different things.

Also, the huge increase is primarily driven by KPOP (in particular, BTS). CD sales growth was like 6% without them.

I don't know that we can draw a conclusion from that 16% except BTS can move physical media.

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

#97

Post by jonhohle »

netsharc wrote: post #33
throw0101d wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 (connec…

There was a short period where CD players with Bluetooth and FM transmitters were made. Pairing is weird and may not work with every vehicle, but FM fallback is, well, as bad as it always has been.

I really like CDs and enjoy buying them second hand when on road trips. It was fun to put in something new while traveling, but now it requires an extra device on the off chance that a CD is found.

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

#98

Post by mbs159 »

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!

That's wild. Popping in a CD is part of the road trip experience!

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

#99

Post by jonhohle »

dylan604 wrote: post #94
idiotsecant wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess what I'm saying is 27 different media players duct taped together does not seem like the peak of engineering. A single wireless protocol seems pretty good.

Back in the day, we'd rate ourselves by how many dongles we'd string together to get things to work.

Some time after the Thunderbolt 3 MacBooks were released I had to get data off of a FireWire 400 drive. Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2, Thunderbolt 2 to FireWire 800, FireWire 800 to FireWire 400. Everything mounted up just fine.

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

#100

Post by mbs159 »

idiotsecant wrote: post #77
dylan604 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"For whatever reason, humanity achieved a lovely little peak of engineering, and then we immediately abandoned it for worse options." "I donno Bluetooth is pretty universal now" Your comment does not disagree with GP's in the way you think it does

I guess what I'm saying is 27 different media players duct taped together does not seem like the peak of engineering. A single wireless protocol seems pretty good.

A single protocol seems to be very limited, especially if your collection of music is purely physical, and for a lot of people it is
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