When I reached a certain age, something strange started to happen. Technology died, but didn’t get replaced – because the world had moved on. Yet the terrifying amount of media I’d accumulated over the decades stuck around. I now exist in a house full of media but lack the equipment to play it on. Which is why I’m buying my first CD player in 20 years.
Actually, that’s not the entire reason. But it feels absurd to have a thousand CDs stacked up, gathering dust on the top shelves of bookcases, wondering if anyone’s ever going to pay them attention again. And although our DVD collection was banished to the loft long ago, my wife and I could not bring ourselves to part with the CDs. Even though we never played them.
In part, that’s because they played an intrinsic role in our history. But also, there’s the investment angle. My wife, being Icelandic, paid a small fortune for every CD she purchased. (Even singles there cost more than albums in the UK.) And although I was more fortunate, and frequently left HMV in Oxford Street armed with carrier bags packed with fire-sale albums, a few quid per disc stacked up over the years.
Play time
But this isn’t just about investment either. Both of us still cherish the idea of the album as a container for music. There’s something deliberate about listening to a carefully curated collection of tracks that tell a story, rather than a streaming service transforming all recorded music into a gigantic jukebox. On Mac, I’ll fire up albums in Apple Music, not playlists. On iPhone, I’ll use Longplay to explore and play my album collection. And while both of those offer great convenience, I’ll feel guilty that I’m never playing the shiny discs from which much of this collection originated.
Natch, people reading this might narrow their eyes and point out that vinyl exists. But CD was my format – the first I cared about and had access to that didn’t drive me bonkers. So although I understand vinyl fetishism, I have no desire to replace a hefty CD collection with records. But I do like the idea of more directly supporting artists again by buying CDs. And also not having to contend with bits of albums (or even entire albums) randomly vanishing from streaming services. Instead, mine will all still be intact and complete, on the shelf. (On lots of shelves, in fact – we’re planning on buying a CD shelving system along with the CD player.)
Back to the future
This isn’t the first time I’ve wrestled with whether to discard or cherish physical media and hardware. A brief flirtation with digital books ended when I decided I loved paper. But with games, the opposite occurred: too many consoles died, and so I have boxes full of cartridges and discs, but no working consoles to play them all on. And even when I do get a machine in my mitts, I recently discovered you can’t always go back – your eyes and hands won’t let you.
With music – and buying a CD player again – I’m hoping things will be different. Of course, it’s possible we’ll build a folly. A shrine to the past. An expensive and sizeable reminder of physical media that in years to come my 10-year-old will be ‘thrilled’ about, when I’m as dead as the Dreamcast in my loft, and she’s left wondering what to do with a thousand obsolete shiny discs.
Although, who knows? By then CDs might be having their third, fourth or fifth wind, following the news that every streaming service is to hike its prices to $99.99 per day and randomly remove tracks and albums because no-one can source old contracts after they were ‘organised’ into oblivion by AI. She’ll thank us then. Although probably not for the NON albums. Hmm. Maybe those thousand shiny discs should be pruned a little bit.