AIBU to miss buying CDs and having a physical music collection?

[Greyblankie]

everything is digital now, Alexa, Spotify, Amazon music etc … I miss buying actual albums, having collections, the art work, the different album covers, the thrill of having a physical collection of your favourite artists - the thrill of a new CD being placed amongst your collection …

Anyone else miss this? Do people actually buy CDs anymore?

Hardly a racket for consumers*! Spotify costs about the same price every month as a single new CD but gives you access to tens of thousands of albums.

(*It's a shit show for performers, I'll grant you, who receive tiny payments when their music is streamed.)

I was going to say, if you hate having spare money but you love a warm sound, vinyl collecting may be for you 😂

They still exist, hmv is busy

I don’t miss the amount of space they take up but I do miss looking through my CD collection and choosing one to play. Whenever I go to Spotify where I can listen to pretty much anything I never know what to choose. Currently I’m not paying for it because it’s an expense I can do without but because I don’t have a CD player it means I only really have the radio to listen to. I just want to actually own music that I can listen to without paying for it every month!

YANBU. We have family Spotify premium, but dh decided to get our whole cd collection back down out of the loft. I thought it was a bit daft, but I've completely changed my mind. I'm loving flipping through all the album covers and listening to stuff I haven't heard for years. Obviously I could have been listening to any of it any time on Spotify, but the choice is so paralysingly huge that I never know what to listen to!

Wow the 1960s. I was just about alive then but not aware that CDs even existed. I vaguely remember them being available but very expensive in 70s, but was still buying vinyl then.
Funny how CDs are so cheap now, even given away!

Yes! I always look for CDs recorded in the 80s and 90s rather than new ones, especially for classical but also Dylan and Donavon etc. The sound is so rich.

CDs did not exist in the 60s, they were introduced by Sony in 1982. I think I bought my first player in '84 or '85, although vinyl was still very much the mainstay of my music collection back then. I also had a Discman which I'd lug about complete with a wallet of every CD I owned selected CDs. Very cumbersome. 😅

If you still want them, you're in luck - they're very cheap second-hand.

I accumulated a lot of them as a youngster in the 90s, and I wouldn't get rid (they represent most of my disposable income for quite a few years. ..) although I use Spotify as well now. I realised that what I was missing was listening to whole albums rather than just skipping to favourite tracks. Not that you can't do that when streaming, but somehow just the slight added friction of getting up and changing the cd means I probably won't. And then it ends and you have to actively choose what's going to next rather than it automatically going to the next thing...so yeah, if I intend to listen to something in its entirely and I own the cd I'll put on the cd. Feels very teenage to me now - playing a whole album and really concentrating on it. Streaming and smartphones and all the rest have really done a number on my attention span - it was better when I was a teen 30 years ago. Sometimes it feels healthy to go back to that.

We got our first CD player in 1987 but at first we only had classical CDs bought by my parents. I was still buying on vinyl and cassette, I didn't really start buying CDs until I was working in the 1990s. I still have all my records, cassettes and CDs and also a selection of my mum's record collection from the 1960s and some of her old reel-to-reel tapes, but nothing on which to play the reel-to-reels sadly. I have a turntable for vinyl, two cassette players and various ancient cassette Walkmans.

Ah, thank you. I must be remembering the early 80s, not the late 70s. You could buy a very small selection at one shop on our high street, if you could afford them. Oooh, yes, I had a discman too eventually, the height of chic.

When available I will still buy physical CDs. I even bought a new CD player at the end of last year.

So did I, and it's great. From Richer Sounds in Manchester, a special trip to listen to the sound quality.

Are you being held hostage in a situation where you're not allowed to go out and buy anything?? Because, last time I checked, it wasn't illegal to buy CD's, or even vinyls, and it doesn't even have to be done in secret, down a dark back alley. They even have shops, out in the open, where you can go and buy them. I know, shocking, isn't it?

CDs weren't really a thing in the early '80s. Only commercially available at all until '83, and not mass market until the second half of the decade.

Very easy to set streaming services to stop at the end of an album instead of auto-playing.

I don't so much have overwhelming choice on music but I really do with TV as a result I never watch anything.

Exactly - which is why I still buy CDs and vinyl and do not have Spotify.

Spotify also doesn't give you the joy of the unexpected, or the previously overlooked. It just gives you more of what you've had before. Which is nice, up to a point, but life really is too short to keep listening to the same thing or close variations of it, from here until death. It's the digital equivalent of those Hits Radio stations.

I actually disagree about this. I really don't like the tiny royalty rates Spotify pay to artists but I have discovered masses of new music through. The platform - in fact, I'd say Spotify discoveries make up at least half of my CD purchases over the last few years, so my experience has been that it's broadened my listening tastes rather than just serving up familiar things.

I think you're using it wrong. It's not a radio station, it's a music library.

Don't you listen to your Discover Weekly?

Don't you go looking through the various genre playlists?

Hits Radio has a playlist of 150 songs. Spotify has millions.