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Payton Sellers, a 22-year-old senior at the University of Texas at Arlington, is already there. “Who knows, we could end up back to lugging around cases of CDs.” “Nostalgia dating from the late ’90s and early 2000s is just so in right now,” she says. Janea Wilson, a 21-year-old Northwestern senior from Detroit, sees CDs growing more popular among her peers precisely because the format’s heyday is fashionable again. “I feel like it definitely has to do with this trend of Y2K,” she says-a point echoed, and negated, by other young CD defenders.

“So sometimes they’re like, ‘Yeah, can I come over and use your radio?’”Ĭacho is clear-eyed about how CDs fit into the current zeitgeist. “Most of my friends who started getting CDs don’t even have a means of playing them,” she laughs. To play them, she first bought a cheap Walkman at Walmart, then upgraded to a Studebaker radio with a CD player. “I was tired of discovering music through YouTube or Spotify,” Cacho tells me. She typically buys her discs from the used bin at Generation Records in Greenwich Village for as little as a quarter (though Green Day’s Dookie cost her $10). She now has 62 CDs spanning punk, metal, screamo, pop, and Christian music. Andrea Cacho, a 20-year-old sophomore at New York University, tells me that she and her friends are “on the CD wave.” Cacho, a WNYU DJ from Puerto Rico, says she bought her first CD-a used copy of New York City indie-rock band New Wet Kojak’s 1995 debut-a year ago, after arriving at school. Cole, and Silk Sonic to push out their CD releases ahead of vinyl backlogs.Īlthough millennials may have soured on CDs during the 2000s, the format has devotees among Gen Z. But it really hasn’t played out that way.” Also keeping the format commercially relevant is the decision by artists like Olivia Rodrigo, J. “We expected less interest than ever coming out of the pandemic quarantine period, where streaming and vinyl sales spiked. “At Amoeba we never saw a stark drop-off in interest in CDs, just some lighter years as the spotlight shifted to LPs,” Henderson says. Jim Henderson, co-owner of California independent chain Amoeba Music, points out that a plunge in used CD prices means that some classic albums are available in the format for as little as $4 to $5. So as the pandemic continues to hit artists’ touring income and the dominant streamer sides with a shock jock, any pronouncement of a CD revival seems understandably contentious. Total spending on CDs is still less than half that of vinyl-let alone streaming, which accounted for 84 percent of recording industry revenue in the first half of 2021. By comparison, vinyl sales have risen 15 straight years. Up until then, CD sales had fallen for 20 straight years, from an inflation-adjusted $19.9 billion in 2000 to $483.3 million in 2020, according to the RIAA. Adele’s new album alone accounted for the entire uptick-two times over.

Setting off this online brouhaha was a small but remarkable statistic: According to industry tracker MRC Data, CD sales rose last year for the first time since 2004.

#SONIC CD SOUNDTRACK ARTIST NO CD#

In mid-January, Rolling Stone’s Rob Sheffield wrote an endearing love letter to compact discs, provocatively headlined “ Jewel-Box Heroes: Why the CD Revival Is Finally Here.” Less than a week later, musician and writer Damon Krukowski offered a thoughtful counterpoint with a catchy title of its own: “ There Is No CD Revival.” For music lovers trying to keep up, it might not only be the shiny plastic circles that are spinning. For a 40-year-old format that peaked in Y2K, the CD has sparked an awful lot of debate lately.

Sonic cd soundtrack artist