There are approximately 100 compact discs on my desk right now. Behind me are two racks holding another 2,000 discs. In my basement, there’s an additional couple thousand, and in my mother’s basement there are about a dozen boxes holding hundreds more of my passionately adored glorified coasters.
I collect vinyl, too, and I’ve held on to some old cassettes. And of course I have two hard drives full of MP3s and a paid subscription to a music streaming service. But at heart I’m a CD collector. I still own CDs I purchased when I was 14. I haven’t retained anything else from when I was 14, except for my teeth. It’s possible my copy of the Singles soundtrack will outlive my molars.
Not only have I not gotten rid of my old CDs, I also buy new CDs nearly every week. Call it loyalty or lunacy, but the CD remains my preferred music delivery device. It’s more convenient than vinyl and more tangible than digital. I like the sense of continuity it gives my music collection, jumbling up records I bought in 1992 with 2003 and 2011 and yesterday. I like picking out discs for car rides and letting them collect over the course of weeks in the backseat. The rest I like looking at on display in my office — it’s part monument, part money pit, part mirror, part climbing hazard for my 2-year-old son.
Even if I wanted to sell my CDs, I probably couldn’t, and I actually like that, too. Used CDs are worth virtually nothing now. But the upside of this is that you can buy older albums on disc for virtually nothing. I’m sympathetic to arguments that Amazon is an evil empire, but I must admit to conspiring with the enemy to build my collection of Miles Davis and Joni Mitchell albums, at prices much lower than the downloads. Accumulating has never been easier, and my shelf space never tighter.
Perhaps I should feel a little embarrassed admitting to all of this. There’s a lot of pressure in our culture right now to essentially imagine CDs out of existence, to mentally finish off what the market is slowly suffocating. Over and over, we’re told that nobody buys them anymore. Only two demographics are commonly identified as CD purchasers in 2014: “old people” and “the semi-Amish not-quite-olds who can’t figure out technology,” the implication being that anybody who knows better wouldn’t bother. CDs currently exist in a cultural no-man’s-land recently defined by singer-songwriter Todd Snider as “post-hip, pre-retro”1 — the format is passé, but not so passé that it qualifies for reclamation.
CDs outsell vinyl records many times over, but CDs don’t have nearly the cachet or booster-ish press coverage. Even cassettes have been revived by indie labels like Burger Records, which are successfully remaking cheap, junky, and sonically wobbly plastic-encased media as collectible boutique items. (This partly explains why, at this very moment, there are cool kids listening to White Lion tapes post-ironically at the trendiest dive bar in your neighborhood.) CD buyers, meanwhile, are made to feel like we’re living in a Richard Matheson story. Just last week, it was reported that CD sales in the first half of 2014 fell 19.6 percent from the first half of 2013. Last year, CD sales represented 57.2 percent of total album sales, which was 10.4 percentage points lower than 2011, when CDs were already in steep decline.
This may sound like the death rattle of a medium, but I prefer taking a glass-half-full perspective: Can you believe that CDs still account for even that many album sales? It’s like discovering that Hollywood is secretly subsidized by VHS hoarders. Apparently there are at least a few people like me still out there: In the past six months, 62.9 million CDs were sold, nearly 10 million more than the 53.8 million downloaded albums. It might be a far cry from the 70.3 billion songs that were streamed during the period, but it’s also a hell of a lot more than “nobody.”
Regular listeners of the WTF With Marc Maron podcast know that at some point in each episode — probably during the monologue, but sometimes during the interview — Maron will typically talk about his love of listening to albums on vinyl. If he mentions a particular artist, it will most likely be Creedence Clearwater Revival. (One out of three times it will be “first four albums”–era Black Sabbath.) Now, I would be as annoyed by a middle-aged man pontificating on the purity of hearing music on wax as you probably are if I didn’t happen to agree with Maron. Listening to CCR on vinyl is indeed phenomenal. Can I interest you in Side 1 of Cosmo’s Factory — hey, where are you going?
My point is, just as there are albums that are well suited to vinyl, there are other albums that work best in other formats. If we are talking Young MC’s Stone Cold Rhymin’, Fine Young Cannibals’ The Raw & The Cooked, or Adam Sandler’s They’re All Gonna Laugh At You! — to name three random but scientifically sound examples — I think we can all agree that shelling out $29.99 for a deluxe vinyl to be played on a stupidly expensive turntable just doesn’t seem right. Those records demand to be played on tape, preferably on a boom box that was purchased in the electronics section of a department store that went out of business in 1993. It feels appropriate to hear those albums this way, just as hearing “Lodi” with pops and crackles feels appropriate.
As for the CD format, I can’t imagine listening to, say, Green Day’s Dookie any other way. Dookie is to CDs what Creedence is to vinyl. It is a record resting eternally in the collective memories of aging music fans, a lost piece of data tucked inside scarcely used multidisc changers and laundry baskets full of shit leftover from collegiate apartments. The Beastie Boys’ Check Your Head is like that, too. So are Odelay, Siamese Dream, and Exile in Guyville. You can’t hear thos records without anticipating the parts where the disc is scratched to hell and won’t stop skipping.
I realize that my pro-CD argument may seem like it’s predicated entirely on personal experience and nostalgia. There’s no reason anyone hearing Dookie for the first time today can’t enjoy it via streaming. But I’m not disparaging new technology or changes in music consumption; rather, I’m making a case for CDs enhancing the listening experience for certain kinds of albums.
And I have reason to believe I’m not alone here. A few years ago I interviewed Father John Misty, early in the promotional cycle for his excellent 2012 album Fear Fun. At the start of our conversation, he casually alluded to listening to Slayer’s Seasons in the Abyss right before I phoned.
“That’s crazy,” I said, “I just bought Seasons in the Abyss at a used CD store yesterday.”
“It’s a very CD kind of album,” he replied.
Exactly.
Just in case not everyone is convinced by what Father John and I are talking about here, I will attempt to make my case with greater clarity by listing five types of albums that justify the continued existence of CDs.
by Steven Hyden, Grantland | Read more:
Image:uncredited
I collect vinyl, too, and I’ve held on to some old cassettes. And of course I have two hard drives full of MP3s and a paid subscription to a music streaming service. But at heart I’m a CD collector. I still own CDs I purchased when I was 14. I haven’t retained anything else from when I was 14, except for my teeth. It’s possible my copy of the Singles soundtrack will outlive my molars.Not only have I not gotten rid of my old CDs, I also buy new CDs nearly every week. Call it loyalty or lunacy, but the CD remains my preferred music delivery device. It’s more convenient than vinyl and more tangible than digital. I like the sense of continuity it gives my music collection, jumbling up records I bought in 1992 with 2003 and 2011 and yesterday. I like picking out discs for car rides and letting them collect over the course of weeks in the backseat. The rest I like looking at on display in my office — it’s part monument, part money pit, part mirror, part climbing hazard for my 2-year-old son.
Even if I wanted to sell my CDs, I probably couldn’t, and I actually like that, too. Used CDs are worth virtually nothing now. But the upside of this is that you can buy older albums on disc for virtually nothing. I’m sympathetic to arguments that Amazon is an evil empire, but I must admit to conspiring with the enemy to build my collection of Miles Davis and Joni Mitchell albums, at prices much lower than the downloads. Accumulating has never been easier, and my shelf space never tighter.
Perhaps I should feel a little embarrassed admitting to all of this. There’s a lot of pressure in our culture right now to essentially imagine CDs out of existence, to mentally finish off what the market is slowly suffocating. Over and over, we’re told that nobody buys them anymore. Only two demographics are commonly identified as CD purchasers in 2014: “old people” and “the semi-Amish not-quite-olds who can’t figure out technology,” the implication being that anybody who knows better wouldn’t bother. CDs currently exist in a cultural no-man’s-land recently defined by singer-songwriter Todd Snider as “post-hip, pre-retro”1 — the format is passé, but not so passé that it qualifies for reclamation.
CDs outsell vinyl records many times over, but CDs don’t have nearly the cachet or booster-ish press coverage. Even cassettes have been revived by indie labels like Burger Records, which are successfully remaking cheap, junky, and sonically wobbly plastic-encased media as collectible boutique items. (This partly explains why, at this very moment, there are cool kids listening to White Lion tapes post-ironically at the trendiest dive bar in your neighborhood.) CD buyers, meanwhile, are made to feel like we’re living in a Richard Matheson story. Just last week, it was reported that CD sales in the first half of 2014 fell 19.6 percent from the first half of 2013. Last year, CD sales represented 57.2 percent of total album sales, which was 10.4 percentage points lower than 2011, when CDs were already in steep decline.
This may sound like the death rattle of a medium, but I prefer taking a glass-half-full perspective: Can you believe that CDs still account for even that many album sales? It’s like discovering that Hollywood is secretly subsidized by VHS hoarders. Apparently there are at least a few people like me still out there: In the past six months, 62.9 million CDs were sold, nearly 10 million more than the 53.8 million downloaded albums. It might be a far cry from the 70.3 billion songs that were streamed during the period, but it’s also a hell of a lot more than “nobody.”
Regular listeners of the WTF With Marc Maron podcast know that at some point in each episode — probably during the monologue, but sometimes during the interview — Maron will typically talk about his love of listening to albums on vinyl. If he mentions a particular artist, it will most likely be Creedence Clearwater Revival. (One out of three times it will be “first four albums”–era Black Sabbath.) Now, I would be as annoyed by a middle-aged man pontificating on the purity of hearing music on wax as you probably are if I didn’t happen to agree with Maron. Listening to CCR on vinyl is indeed phenomenal. Can I interest you in Side 1 of Cosmo’s Factory — hey, where are you going?
My point is, just as there are albums that are well suited to vinyl, there are other albums that work best in other formats. If we are talking Young MC’s Stone Cold Rhymin’, Fine Young Cannibals’ The Raw & The Cooked, or Adam Sandler’s They’re All Gonna Laugh At You! — to name three random but scientifically sound examples — I think we can all agree that shelling out $29.99 for a deluxe vinyl to be played on a stupidly expensive turntable just doesn’t seem right. Those records demand to be played on tape, preferably on a boom box that was purchased in the electronics section of a department store that went out of business in 1993. It feels appropriate to hear those albums this way, just as hearing “Lodi” with pops and crackles feels appropriate.
As for the CD format, I can’t imagine listening to, say, Green Day’s Dookie any other way. Dookie is to CDs what Creedence is to vinyl. It is a record resting eternally in the collective memories of aging music fans, a lost piece of data tucked inside scarcely used multidisc changers and laundry baskets full of shit leftover from collegiate apartments. The Beastie Boys’ Check Your Head is like that, too. So are Odelay, Siamese Dream, and Exile in Guyville. You can’t hear thos records without anticipating the parts where the disc is scratched to hell and won’t stop skipping.
I realize that my pro-CD argument may seem like it’s predicated entirely on personal experience and nostalgia. There’s no reason anyone hearing Dookie for the first time today can’t enjoy it via streaming. But I’m not disparaging new technology or changes in music consumption; rather, I’m making a case for CDs enhancing the listening experience for certain kinds of albums.
And I have reason to believe I’m not alone here. A few years ago I interviewed Father John Misty, early in the promotional cycle for his excellent 2012 album Fear Fun. At the start of our conversation, he casually alluded to listening to Slayer’s Seasons in the Abyss right before I phoned.
“That’s crazy,” I said, “I just bought Seasons in the Abyss at a used CD store yesterday.”
“It’s a very CD kind of album,” he replied.
Exactly.
Just in case not everyone is convinced by what Father John and I are talking about here, I will attempt to make my case with greater clarity by listing five types of albums that justify the continued existence of CDs.
by Steven Hyden, Grantland | Read more:
Image:uncredited
