The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) recently released its mid-year report on the state of the music business, and if you’re a fan of disc-shaped receptacles of recorded sound, the news isn’t all bad. In the first half of 2024, physical media brought in an appreciable $994 million for the American music industry, versus $882 million in the first half of 2023 and $840 million in the first half of 2022.
If you’re wondering why I’m spewing statistics at you, it really boils down to this: What most people don’t realize is that almost all of my editorials start life as questions posed to me by SoundStage! founder Doug Schneider. This month, he asked a simple one: “Are CDs really making a comeback?”
So, let’s start in the most obvious place, by digging deeper into the numbers referenced above. The RIAA report says, and I quote, “For the fourth consecutive year, vinyl outsold CDs in units (24 million vs 17 million). Revenues from CDs were relatively flat at $237 million in 2024.”
To be precise, in the first half of 2024, 16.8 million new CDs found homes vs. 16.2 million in the first half of 2023, and revenues amounted to $236.7 million vs. $236 million, an uptick of 3.3% in terms of units moved and just 0.3% in terms of revenue.
For what it’s worth, in that same period, vinyl saw an increase of 10.7% in terms of units sold and 17% in terms of revenue—a sign of just how ridiculously expensive new records are getting. Anecdotally, back in 2019, long before I had any intention of buying a new turntable, I paid $25 for a new vinyl copy of King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard’s Infest the Rats’ Nest, and it wasn’t a limited-edition pressing, Just this year, I paid $35 for the mass-market release of the band’s latest, Flight b741. Both are single LPs. I got into the vinyl hobby at exactly the wrong time. But that’s a rant for another day.
The thing is, as I said in an editorial a few years back, I never really stopped buying CDs, although my buying habits have changed a lot in the era of streaming. I always spring for the annual Dave’s Picks subscription from the Grateful Dead, which comprises four multi-disc HDCD releases a year plus one bonus disc. I’ll also snag the annual Grateful Dead box set if it’s from ’69, ’71, ’72, ’74, or ’77, with a hard maybe for ’73 and ’78 runs, depending on the venue.
Just speaking for myself here, as I read back over that aforementioned editorial about CDs, I’m reminded of a three-years-younger version of me who was getting legitimately excited about physical media again and on the quest for a new CD player, since my old Oppo BDP-95 was dying completely to death. What did I end up buying? Well, I didn’t. I just moved my old Oppo BDP-93 from the bedroom to my two-channel listening room because my wife and I never used it for watching movies on sleepy Saturdays anymore.
That’s my own personal proclivities, though, which is not what Doug was asking about. How is the CD format doing as a whole? Well, that article is also a good anchor point for ruminating on whether the lowly Compact Disc is doing better now than it was then, on the balance sheet beyond the numbers quoted above.
For whatever reason, when pondering the state of CD-playing hardware, I chose Crutchfield’s offerings as my metric in 2021 and observed that the retailer “currently carries fewer than 20 CD players under $1000.” How are things shaping up today by that same metric? Not bad. Not bad at all. By my count, there are now 31 decks under a grand, and although some of them have more of a pro-audio vibe and a few of them are CD transports only, that’s still a 55% increase in the number of available players. And Crutchfield doesn’t even carry TEAC, a company that’s doing some legitimately interesting stuff in this space.
One thing one can’t help but notice about all of those new players and transports, though, is that none of them supports the HDCD format in which all the new CDs I purchase are mastered. If you’re not familiar, HDCD is a long-defunct backwards-compatible format that uses dithering, along with some low-level range extension and optional soft limiting, to allegedly eke 20 bits’ worth of effective dynamic range out of a 16-bit audio signal. Only a handful of new HDCD titles are released every year these days, and Deadheads buy most of them. But why don’t any hardware manufacturers these days support the format, when so many include hardware support for equally esoteric technologies like MQA?
I asked around amongst my manufacturing friends and couldn’t get anyone to reply in time—not merely to the question about HDCD, but also just some vague marketing blah-blah about how well their CD players are doing in the grand scheme of things, especially as compared with a couple years ago. Alas, if responses start pouring in after my deadline, maybe I’ll fast-track a sequel to this story. We’ll see.
In the meantime, I decided to stop by my local record shop, Village Green Records, to talk with owner Travis Harvey about his experience with CDs, given that I’ve seen the occasional Compact Disc on his shelves and have even purchased one or two. Is he seeing more requests for polycarbonate/aluminum sandwiches these days? Any hint of a CD comeback in his shop?
“I’m looking at my market and I haven’t seen or witnessed anything even leaning toward that in any way possible,” he told me. “Now, maybe part of that is due to the emphasis I put on vinyl and maybe that affects how many people come in searching for CDs. Maybe if I made a bigger push to let people know we carry CDs—maybe if I did the social media posts like I do with LPs—that would change things a little. But frankly I don’t know.”
I asked Travis how things had changed over the years since he originally opened his shop in Muncie before moving south to Montgomery. As physical media sales overall have fluctuated, as the ratio between CD and LP changed and how? “When the store initially opened in 2006 or 2007, we had primarily CDs,” he told me. “And we had maybe four rows of vinyl, which was kinda unheard of at that time. But to every one LP, we would sell four to five CDs. And we were already unorthodox for having new LPs at all. But we did, because a few labels were still pressing vinyl of indie artists even in that time.”
I asked him when that ratio started to flip, because you could easily walk into Village Green and not know the shop sells CDs at all. “It didn’t take long,” he replied. “It remained at that ratio for probably the first four or five years [of the shop’s existence] and then slowly vinyl grew. And there were watersheds: The indie scene began to grow, and so people began to want to listen to Bon Iver or Godspeed You! Black Emperor or any number of other indie artists. Also, we saw more interest in the past: Bad Brains and Joy Division and Fugazi, and a lot of that music was living on vinyl, which led to interest in the format.”
I asked Travis what the customer who comes into the shop shopping for CDs instead of vinyl looks like. Demographically speaking, I mean. “Funny enough, someone came in today looking for CDs for her mom. She’s like 55 or 60 and she wants GloRilla CDs. And I’m like, ‘Oh, well, GloRilla is primarily a streaming artist mostly consumed on Spotify, I’d say.’ But GloRilla is not on vinyl. Her new album is on CD, though. My distributor has it available for order. So that’s an interesting corner case, but I’m glad it’s at least available on some form of disc you can hold in your hand and walk out of the store with.
“I also get kids coming in because their parents still have a CD player in the home. And by ‘kids,’ I mean like aged nine to fourteen or something like that. The thing is, though, I have way more kids browsing the vinyl. And they’re having a lot more fun just flipping through the racks of records like you’re doing right now. We have a stepstool for them. Just for kids.”
I asked Travis about the price disparity between LPs and CDs, especially in this past year, where vinyl prices have just gotten absolutely out of control as a result of the same price-gouging that makes eggs a luxury. “To your point, by and large, I think most people who are buying CDs are doing it because they’re living on a budget,” he said. “And I love for people not to miss out on cool new music because times are tough economically. So the fact that CDs are out there is why I’m a firm believer in carrying them, even if I’m not investing a lot of money into carrying them. But I believe in having them for that simple fact. And I’m building a new shelf for CDs, just to make them a little more visible and a little more browsable.”
It’s funny—I feel much the same. Going forward, I don’t think my CD-buying habits will change. I’m listening to a crap-ton more CDs these days than I did just a few years ago, but I’m not buying new discs with more frequency. I of course sprung for this year’s Dave’s Picks sub, but I passed on the Grateful Dead’s Friend of The Devils: April 1978 box because 1) I’m dead-ass broke and 2) my soundboard bootlegs of those shows sound plenty fine and I never listen to them anyway.
That said, my wife and I are bringing some of our CDs out of storage and putting them on shelves about halfway between her office and my two-channel listening room. We’re definitely dedicating more space to CDs in our house, which I guess counts as an investment of sorts. But the truth of the matter is that I just kinda don’t care if CDs are coming back in any meaningful sense. All I really care about is whether the format has enough support that people like me can still find well-made players without spending a fortune.
But let’s pretend I was really invested in this question and wanted to see Compact Disc sales rebound in a meaningful way. What signs would I be looking for, beyond the biannual RIAA reports? Given the way things are going with vinyl, I think a good sign of the format’s popularity would be $50 Walmart-exclusive editions of the latest CD releases clogging the endcaps. That’s how you’ll know for sure the format is alive and well.
So, be careful what you wish for, my fellow CD fans. I only know one thing in life for certain: If the Compact Disc becomes popular enough again that it makes headlines—if sales figures skyrocket and we suddenly see a “CD Store Day” type of celebration—us working-class folk wouldn’t be able to afford the damned things for very much longer.
. . . Dennis Burger
dennisb@soundstagenetwork.com
