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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

#151

Post by krogenx »

21asdffdsa12 wrote: post #128
herrh wrote: post #107

In order to make my kids (2 and 4) be able to play music on their own without having to use a smart device or screen i bought an old boombox for like 10 dollars a couple of years ago. We buy a lot of records, though exclusively in goodwill-like stores, and they love it. They have a lot of audiobooks for kids but also cd:s with music. A favourite right now is Aquas debut album Aquarium (the one with Barbie Girl) I thi…

Anyone else remember the superb manuals that used to come with games? The starcrat and warcraft manuals. Drawings and lore. Diablo. Those old games came with books.

I remember fondly spending countless hours looking through the Icewind Dale manual.

Unfortunately, I purchased Baldur’s Gate 1/2 many years later with no manual. I’m sure it had an awesome manual as well.

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

#152

Post by kibwen »

21asdffdsa12 wrote: post #128
herrh wrote: post #107

In order to make my kids (2 and 4) be able to play music on their own without having to use a smart device or screen i bought an old boombox for like 10 dollars a couple of years ago. We buy a lot of records, though exclusively in goodwill-like stores, and they love it. They have a lot of audiobooks for kids but also cd:s with music. A favourite right now is Aquas debut album Aquarium (the one with Barbie Girl) I thi…

Anyone else remember the superb manuals that used to come with games? The starcrat and warcraft manuals. Drawings and lore. Diablo. Those old games came with books.

The Civ III manual was 242 pages long: https://archive.org/details/Civilization_3_-_Manual/mode/2up

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

#153

Post by MrDOS »

specproc wrote: post #120
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…

I did the same for a friend's birthday recently: put together a bunch of mix CDs as a present. My concession to the fact he probably doesn't use a CD player much was a QR code, with a link to a matching Spotify playlist.

Two years ago, we sent CDs as our wedding invitations. We also received a lot of feedback to the effect that lots of our guests had difficulty finding a way to play the discs (including at least one person who was incredulous that the CD was real; but that might be because we sent vinyl-effect CDs).

I put a Spotify code[0] to the playlist on the back cover as a concession to streaming, but if anyone knew what it was and used it, they never told me.

[0]: https://www.spotifycodes.com/

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

#154

Post by hibikir »

krogenx wrote: post #151
21asdffdsa12 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone else remember the superb manuals that used to come with games? The starcrat and warcraft manuals. Drawings and lore. Diablo. Those old games came with books.

I remember fondly spending countless hours looking through the Icewind Dale manual. Unfortunately, I purchased Baldur’s Gate 1/2 many years later with no manual. I’m sure it had an awesome manual as well.

Those came with spiral bound manuals, as they were that tjick, attempting to explain at least some of D&D 2nd edition, even when the full rules were out pf scope

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

#155

Post by loloquwowndueo »

herrh wrote: post #107

In order to make my kids (2 and 4) be able to play music on their own without having to use a smart device or screen i bought an old boombox for like 10 dollars a couple of years ago. We buy a lot of records, though exclusively in goodwill-like stores, and they love it. They have a lot of audiobooks for kids but also cd:s with music. A favourite right now is Aquas debut album Aquarium (the one with Barbie Girl) I thi…

> Vinyl records are still too hard to put on

Nonsense. Me and my bro happily put records of fairy tales and Disney movie adaptations back in the 80s on our crappy portable record player (don’t you dare call this thing a turntable). Harder than a cd? For sure. Too hard for a 5 year old? Certainly not, as long as you don’t mind the record itself facing some rough handling. Which they survived just fine, anyway.

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

#156

Post by thaumasiotes »

21asdffdsa12 wrote: post #128
herrh wrote: post #107

In order to make my kids (2 and 4) be able to play music on their own without having to use a smart device or screen i bought an old boombox for like 10 dollars a couple of years ago. We buy a lot of records, though exclusively in goodwill-like stores, and they love it. They have a lot of audiobooks for kids but also cd:s with music. A favourite right now is Aquas debut album Aquarium (the one with Barbie Girl) I thi…

Anyone else remember the superb manuals that used to come with games? The starcrat and warcraft manuals. Drawings and lore. Diablo. Those old games came with books.

Lemmings 2 came with a short story describing the journey of Jimmy McLemming around the Lemmings world. It was great.

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

#157

Post by jghn »

I'm in the middle of the GenX zone, and have regularly been seeing bands play at small music clubs my entire adult life. When I was younger they'd sell cassette tapes at their merch booth, and that gave way to CDs. Then at some point in the late 00's that shifted to vinyl because CDs became passe, and while most people had shifted to online music vinyl was cool again.

That shifted again in the mid-teens when I started noticing more bands selling cassette tapes, especially in the more underground scenes. Then it was back to vinyl when things got back in action post-COVID.

But what I've noticed over the last couple of years is everyone's selling CDs again. What's more, they're *actually focusing on CDs*. Over the last 20-30 years it's been more an assumption that one is going to download the music and sure, maybe buy some physical media at the merch table. Now it seems like the assumption is you're going to just buy the physical media.

I've found that interesting.

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

#158

Post by Kirby64 »

eru wrote: post #109
Kirby64 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or just… don’t buy ones that have noise canceling? Not that hard and often cheaper. Again I’m comparing $20 headphones here. Nobody is saying $100 wired headphones aren’t gonna be better than $100 wireless ones for sound. But, if you want ANC for planes or something then you are going to be using wireless headphones anyways.

> But, if you want ANC for planes or something then you are going to be using wireless headphones anyways. Why? I used to use wired Bose noise cancelling headphones in the late 2010s.

And basically all current gen ANC headphones still offer wired options as well, including Bose. But they still come with wireless if you’d opt to use it. My comment was in reference to the ANC “clamping on your head” which is sort of irrelevant to wired vs wireless.

Also, a significant advantage to wireless when using ANC is you don’t have to deal with cable noise. Especially in a quiet office environment, noise from the cable moving around on your body gets amplified and you can hear it.

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

#159

Post by thaumasiotes »

q7xvh97o2pDhNrh wrote: post #39
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).

> 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…

I had a car with just a tape deck. This turns out to be all you want.

I went through two phases:

1. I ordered some type of Walkman-like car kit that came with a portable CD player, glue strips to adhere the CD player to your dashboard, and a cassette tape adapter that plugged into an aux port (on the CD player) and inserted into the tape deck. I'd burn CDs to play in the car that way.

2. I got a Zen Stone, a tiny mp3 player with no screen that was easy to operate by feel. I stored mp3s on it... and plugged the cassette adapter that I still had into it. That was as good as in-car music can get without being voice operated.

They still make the adapters: https://www.amazon.com/Arsvita-Audio-Cassette-Adapter-Auxill...

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

#160

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

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…

It's hard to buy people media now. You can't really gift people CDs, DVDs, or Blu-Rays because nobody has players anymore.
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