Why I Collect CDs, And Why You Should Too

If you're old enough to remember the feeling of pressing the eject button on an old car cd player, then you can appreciate the sense of déjà vu I experienced not too long ago. I haven't looked back since.

After binge watching The Last Dance during lockdown, like every other sheep to popular culture, my short-lived obsession with the Chicago Bulls came to fruition pretty easily. So, it’s no surprise that when pondering what name I should give my trusty stallion of a black Mini Cooper, it wasn’t long before I settled on Dennis Rodman.

While Dennis is as eccentric as they come, he's a world away from the technological marvels of Silicon Valley. With a detritus cigarette lighter just about intact beneath the gearstick, I would call him more of a Boomer compared to his Gen Z counterparts.

Unsurprisingly, his old age means that my options for playing music have always been pretty limited. With Bluetooth out of the question, I had always relied on the subpar £5.99 aux cables from the "Amazon Basics" section. Predictably, these had a lifespan hardly as long as my obsession with the Chicago Bulls. 

As my bank account started declining the repeated purchase of these cables, I had to look for a more sustainable alternative. I bid farewell to the convenience of having music at my fingertips and reluctantly embraced what I considered a bygone era—CDs.

One sun-drenched day in Leeds, when I should have been buried in the depths of my dissertation, Daisy and I seized a well-deserved day off and took Dennis for a spin to Harrogate. Aimlessly wandering between charity shops like lost children, my quest for treasuries initially seemed futile.

Just as I was about to surrender to the disappointment, in a dark corner of the muggy shop stood a wall of poorly organised plastic sheets, all huddled together like Taylor Swift fans outside of a Hilton Hotel. Underneath a battered Robbie Williams record emerged a worn-out relic of Radiohead's OK Computer. It shook me to my core, the same way that Shakira shook the hips of the planet in 2005.

Radiohead had been my lifeline in lockdown. Offering an experimental and trailblazing discography, coupled with their nonchalant socialist agenda, my obsession with Thom Yorke and his laid-back squad was…surprise, surprise…very easily attained. So much so, that by the end of 2020, Spotify Wrapped crowned me as one of the elite 0.01% of their 24 million monthly listeners - quite an achievement if I do say so myself. 

Cancer Research UK were selling the holy grail for a mere pound; an absolute steal if you ask me. After exchanging a pound coin and a large smile for the compact disc, I placed it neatly in my pocket and stampeded back to the car. We waited patiently as the disc started to spin, and as the weeping instrumental to Airbag began to play it was like a Jigsaw Falling Into Place - wink, wink.

We listened to the whole album, start to finish.

Before this moment, I couldn’t remember the last time I experienced the entirety of an album in one sitting. It was only then that I realised what I had been missing out on.

A few weeks earlier, I had written an essay debating whether we should ever separate the art from the artist. My unwavering stance advocated for their unity. The reason for this being that without the artist, the art becomes an empty void, bereft of all meaning and value. Picasso himself once said, “you can’t just know the works of an artist, you also need to know when he made them, why, how, and in what circumstances”.

It’s through an understanding of an artist’s personal struggles, mental anguish, and experiences as a human being that we gain valuable context and appreciation for one’s artistic creations. This is what listening to a whole album does; it contextualises the record and provides an unworldly understanding as to what the artist was feeling at the time, and what they were trying to express.

The individual songs that you used to listen to shuffled in a playlist become a unified collection of collateral pieces. To put it simply, would you rather see a Grayson Perry torn into shreds and hung in separate parts of the museum, or would you rather see it as a whole piece together, all in one place? I would assume the latter.

The whole thing tells the full story, rather than just separate fragments of it. It is this completion and contextualisation of listening to the whole record that lets you dive so far deeper into the music and understand all of its complexities. It lets you see the everything in a whole new light.

So okay, we get it. Listen to the whole album. But why on a CD? Why not just listen to the album on a streaming platform like Spotify? 

I hear your point. The digitalisation of music has opened a whole new world to the availability of music at our fingertips. Simply by entering your email address into a digital streaming platform like Spotify, you can listen to more than 100 million songs. This has allowed us to be more diverse with our music preferences; you no longer have to go to HMV and browse through tens of records until you find what you like. Instead, you can type any genre into the search bar, and the world is your oyster.

But there's something glaringly nostalgic about the shiny polycarbonate plastic laser compact discs. Every time I press the eject button and feel the sensation of it clicking into its socket, I hear a whirl of spins that creates a brief moment of suspense, almost like the prolonged pause before Maya Jama announces who’s been dumped from the Love Island villa.

I’m thrown back to the days of the school run when Black Eyed Peas’ iconic The E.N.D. was on a never-ending repeat in the early hours of the morning – sorry, Mum. The constant cycle of listening to an album over and over meant that before one song would finish, you were already singing the lyrics to the next. CDs take me back to those simpler times.

In fact, I love the nostalgia so much that I even spent my savings from my waitress job on a glamorous new CD player this summer - of which I am yet to decide a name. I now consider it a morning ritual to wander over to the CD rack, flick through my greatly expanded collection, and pick the perfect record to kickstart the day. For some, the day begins with yoga and celery juice. Mine begins with a coffee in one hand, a cigarette in the other, and a click of the eject button.

So sure, you could just hit shuffle on your go-to playlist, but there's something about the tangible, tactile joy of a CD that makes me feel like a child again, free of the horrors of our digitalised world.

CDs might be more fun than Spotify, but why choose CDs over vinyl, I hear you ask?

Vinyl seems to be all the rage these days, and it's got its fair share of fun factors. It allows you to mix tracks, and flipping through records at a store not knowing exactly what you'll get can be a thrilling surprise. I love vinyl too, but let's face it, CDs are a whole lot easier on the wallet. When bought new, CDs are often a third of the price of vinyl. So, if you’re also a scavenging student struggling to survive in this current financial climate, CDs might be a better companion for your bank account.

There’s more to this CD love affair than thriftiness, though. Actually buying CDs, or any music for that matter, is a huge win for the artists.

Let me break it down: before the dawn of streaming, the music business had always been fed by selling something. You’d pay an upfront price for a CD or an iTunes song, the labels would get the money, and the music was yours forever. This was hugely beneficial to record labels and artists; they got paid the same amount regardless of whether you listened to the music a hundred times or never took the disc out of its case.  

All good things, however, do in fact come to an end…

Nowadays, artists and labels mostly get paid by the number of streams. Think of it as though you’re renting their music. The more you listen to it, the more they get paid. But if the songs are a one-hit wonder, your favourite artist might also be struggling to pay their bills this month. 

This new model of music streaming isn’t good for artists. You can only listen to a song so many times before you get bored. Moreover, there are only 24 hours in a day. In reality, you’re probably only listening to music for 1 or 2 of those. What this means is that there’s now a finite pool of money from which artists can bring home the bacon, and it’s all dependent on how often you listen to their songs.

I did some digging to find out what this really means for the industry, but before I dive into this, I advise you to put your seatbelt on – things are about to get bumpy… 

The rate it always changing, but if you wanted to stream a song for x number of times so that it would equate to a sale of that song, you’d have to play to it roughly 200 times.

To put this into context, I checked out my Spotify Wrapped so you didn’t have to…

My top song in 2022 was played only 74 times. Yup, that’s right - I didn’t even hit the halfway mark. Now, of course, Radiohead was my top artist in 2022 with 1,715 minutes in the bag (I didn’t quite make the 0.01 percentile of listeners that year, but I’ll take the top 0.5%). Assuming that each Radiohead song averages out at about 3:30 minutes, if we divide 1,715 minutes by 3.5 minutes, that means I listened to roughly 490 Radiohead songs in 2022.

 Don’t fall asleep yet…

Considering that it takes 200 listens to equate to a purchase, that means that all of my streaming only ‘paid’ for 2.45 songs from Radiohead.

That’s really saying a lot. I'm clearly one of their top listeners, but in the grand scheme of things they only earned the equivalent of two and a half song purchases from me. So, whilst I’m paying £130 a year for my Spotify subscription, XL Recordings (Radiohead’s record label) didn’t even get £2.50 of that. That’s right, all of those streams wouldn’t even buy them a meal deal.

Let’s dig a little deeper…My total play time was 38,252 minutes. Once again assuming that each song averages out at around 3:30 minutes, that means that I listened to roughly 10,857 songs in total.

 Still with me?

Taking into account that I listened to 1,664 artists, this means that on average, each artist only got 6.5 listens from me. In monetary terms, that means that I distributed £0.02 to each artist I listened to in 2022.

Hold your horses…This is worsened for two reasons. Firstly, this figure is calculated on average, but I listened to Radiohead way more than I listened to other artists. This means that in reality, the vast majority of artists I listened to received far less than the measly 2p. Not only, but only about 10% of this figure actually makes its way to the artist, because the majority is slipped into the record labels’ pocket. But let’s leave that discussion for another time…

I hope your mouth is also on the floor.

I know that was a lot of jargon, but having seen the numbers for streaming, lets turn back to CDs…

I recently bought Wunderhorse’s debut album, Cub. Now, I did fork out and spend £10.99, but if we do the girl math, that’s about three oat milk flat whites - a price I am most definitely willing to pay. Through that one sale, Wunderhorse got more than 4x what Radiohead received from me in 2022.  

On top of that, I also bought their most recent album, Pinky, I Love You. So, in actual fact, Wunderhorse this year have earned nearly 9x the amount that Radiohead earned from my streams in 2022.

What this shows is that although streaming has its many benefits for us consumers (it’s cheap, convenient, and accessible), in reality, it really ain’t good for the artists or labels.

The thrill of CDs not only encompasses the warming hug of nostalgia, and the joy of diving deep into the artists’ minds, but it really goes a lot further if you’re wanting to support the artists. So, if you're craving some nostalgia and are looking spread the love this Christmas, do yourself, your favourite artists, and Dennis Rodman a favour, and go out and buy a CD.