Business CD sales grow for first time since 2004 - 2021 CD sales were up more than $100 million from 2020.

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Dust off those plastic binders that lived in the back seat of your car and fire up the boombox, because compact discs are back.
  • CD sales enjoyed year-over-year growth for the first time since 2004, according to the Recording Industry Association of America's annual sales report.
  • Combined with the decade-long vinyl sales explosion, overall physical music sales grew for the first time since 1996.
Why it matters: Streaming is the new lifeblood of the music industry, but physical music is enjoying a resurgence that can no longer be dismissed as a passing fad driven by hardcore collectors.

By the numbers: Physical music sales exploded to the tune of $1.65 billion in the U.S. last year, according to the RIAA data.
  • CD sales grew to $584.2 million nationally last year, up more than $100 million from 2020. By comparison, 2021 vinyl sales increased to $1 billion annually, up from $643.9 million.
Zoom in: It's especially good news for local record stores, like Grimey's on East Trinity Lane. Co-owner Doyle Davis tells Axios that vinyl is still king, but CD sales have "held their own."
  • Davis has noticed strong CD sales for new albums, especially when there is a delay in the vinyl release, and pointed to the new album by Adia Victoria last year as an example.
  • "I think really this is about young people who are finding they like hard copies of music in the digital age," Davis says.
Be smart: The CD was the music industry's leading format in the 1990s, peaking at $13.2 billion in annual sales in 2000.
  • You know what happened next. Napster and illegal streaming sites gave way to paid streaming, which now accounts for $8.6 billion in annual revenue.
  • In addition to record stores, artists have appreciated the rise in vinyl — and now CD sales — because it gives them another avenue to sell their music.
What they're saying: "I just think the whole thing is great," Davis says. "It speaks to the health and the overall comeback of physical media in general."

Time to bust out your Discman, frens. What's old is new again!

 
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Socrates said:
The sound quality hype around vinyl is all horse shit, CD is generally almost always better quality. Not that vinyl isn't cool, it turns the music listening into more of a ritual where you're more likely to listen to the whole album as it was intended to be listened to, because skipping songs is more difficult than just pushing a button.
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The neatest part about vinyl, assuming it was mixed before the digital era, is that you're listening to the exact same waveforms as were played by the artist. The music went straight to a blank via cutting head, no digitization or anything. If you play it back via tube amp, the waveforms are basically identical. Absolutely meaningless in any capacity, but neat.

Also, vinyl was re popularized because of the loudness wars during the late 90s/2000s
 
TurdFondler said:
The neatest part about vinyl, assuming it was mixed before the digital era, is that you're listening to the exact same waveforms as were played by the artist. The music went straight to a blank via cutting head, no digitization or anything. If you play it back via tube amp, the waveforms are basically identical. Absolutely meaningless in any capacity, but neat.

Also, vinyl was re popularized because of the loudness wars during the late 90s/2000s
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It's kind of like precision vs. accuracy- vinyl always plays you the same waveforms but has its technical limitations. CDs and the general technical improvements allow for much higher quality music, but it takes a good mix to utilize it correctly. As far as the article goes: always pirated music, always will. Weird how services have come and gone and I have audio files from some of my first forays onto the internet. I have a Read/Write CD/DVD/BluRay drive too. Why should I purposely hamstring my capabilities?
 
The difference is indistinguishable to the human ear and a good amp and mixer will nullify any differences between CD and Vinyl but I just love the idea of thermionic valves. Waves go in, bigger waves come out.
 
DuckSucker said:
Cassettes are a thing, I remember a few years back there were guys on bandcamp selling "limited release cassettes" to the hipsters buying vinyls, but I guess it didnt catch on that big. I kinda thought it would because walking around with a Walkman and over the head headphones seems like a very hipster thing to do.

Maybe its an aspect of vinyls being saved by certain boomers and there have always been hipsters into repairing and collecting stereos and record players, while cassettes and the like were the peak of 'it doesnt matter if you break it, buy another', but CDs are still relatively recent enough that people could come back to them.
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Cassettes are making a comeback too, Taylor Swift just put out the rerecorded version of Fearless in a double tape pack and the latest Coldplay album also has a tape version. These aren't even collectors items either, most of them are retailing for even cheaper than the CD and digital versions.
 
Block Me said:
Cassettes are making a comeback too, Taylor Swift just put out the rerecorded version of Fearless in a double tape pack and the latest Coldplay album also has a tape version. These aren't even collectors items either, most of them are retailing for even cheaper than the CD and digital versions.
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Holy fuck, we HAVE gone back to the 80's. Watch out for those shoulders, ladies.
 
Beautiful Border said:
CDs have always been the best physical medium for music. The only reason vinyl records and cassette tapes have had a resurgence is because zoomers who didn't grow up with them think they're novel.

Now, there's two possibilities here: either the novelty of records and cassettes has worn off and they're choosing CDs because they're realising they were better, or zoomers are now so young that even CDs seem exotic and unusual to them. I really hope it's not the latter or else I feel ancient...
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Micro sds would be the best single storage format if they were cheap enough at scale to compete, but at this point I think small storage cards might be.
 
Yes but a solid state amp can't output a true analog waveform, the input wave goes through an a2d converter and then the resulting output waveform is quantized, whereas a thermionic valve is pure pass-through that doesn't reconstruct the wave only embiggens it.
 
TurdFondler said:
Yes but a solid state amp can't output a true analog waveform, the input wave goes through an a2d converter and then the resulting output waveform is quantized, whereas a thermionic valve is pure pass-through that doesn't reconstruct the wave only embiggens it.
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No, solid state amps can be completely analog (and often are). A transistor works much like a tube - just better in every way.
 
byuu said:
No, solid state amps can be completely analog (and often are). A transistor works much like a tube - just better in every way.
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How? I thought a transistor has 2 discrete states, on or off. I was under the impression they just quantized the wave an absurd amount of times so the steps were in tiny increments.
 
TurdFondler said:
How? I thought a transistor has 2 discrete states, on or off. I was under the impression they just quantized the wave an absurd amount of times so the steps were in tiny increments.
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No, transistors are analog.

There is a certain type of transistor, the MOSFET which you often want to completely turn on and off since they're the most power efficient at those states. But even those are still analog.
 
I'm starting to think there's a valid reason I never finished Semiconductor Devices II (that reason is because I am retarded)

Lmao

If CDs are coming back remember to never keep your real ones in the car because they will be stolen. Also, those CD sleeves for the sun visor were the shit, but don't get conned into the big 50cd changer they install in your trunk.
 
a CD is a much better gift thant a giftcard, also streaming sucks, the whole system is overcomplicated and i can get better stuff for free from youtube without the stupid ads some streaming services have.
 
It also helps the fact that new Vinyl and the current used Vinyl market is expensive and CDs are faction of the cost. I wouldn't be surprised if the younger vinyl crowd is starting to see the appeal of CDs over the various issues of Vinyl (surface noise, space, cost to get a decent turntable and amp for a good sound)
 
I'm not surprised.

A lot of music fans that value physical releases have been priced out of vinyl and some have been burned by the "here today gone tomorrow" nature of streaming services.

Then there are a whole bunch of releases from the '80s through to the '00s that have never been re-released and aren't on streaming services.

Some of these might be on YouTube or Soulseek of you're lucky, but they're not quite the same (even if you're really lucky and find FLACs on slsk).

TurdFondler said:
vinyl was re popularized because of the loudness wars during the late 90s/2000s
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tbf that was the fault of the record companies and producers rather than of CD media. But unfortunately it gave CDs a bad name.

Many pre-loudness wars CDs still sound brilliant.
 
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