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Compact Discs are filed uneasily between the nostalgic lo-fi authenticity of vinyl and the veritable perfection and ultra-convenience of digital, in a state of technological obsolescence. It’s a format with essentially no value–unless you like it, that is. CDs are a market that virtually doesn’t exist, yet there it is to be exploited. From Steven Hyden’s Grantland piece “The CD Case“:

“Not only have I not gotten rid of my old CDs, I also buy new CDs nearly every week. Call it loyalty or lunacy, but the CD remains my preferred music delivery device. It’s more convenient than vinyl and more tangible than digital. I like the sense of continuity it gives my music collection, jumbling up records I bought in 1992 with 2003 and 2011 and yesterday. I like picking out discs for car rides and letting them collect over the course of weeks in the backseat. The rest I like looking at on display in my office — it’s part monument, part money pit, part mirror, part climbing hazard for my 2-year-old son.

Even if I wanted to sell my CDs, I probably couldn’t, and I actually like that, too. Used CDs are worth virtually nothing now. But the upside of this is that you can buy older albums on disc for virtually nothing. I’m sympathetic to arguments that Amazon is an evil empire, but I must admit to conspiring with the enemy to build my collection of Miles Davis and Joni Mitchell albums, at prices much lower than the downloads. Accumulating has never been easier, and my shelf space never tighter.

Perhaps I should feel a little embarrassed admitting to all of this. There’s a lot of pressure in our culture right now to essentially imagine CDs out of existence, to mentally finish off what the market is slowly suffocating. Over and over, we’re told that nobodybuys them anymore. Only two demographics are commonly identified as CD purchasers in 2014: ‘old people’ and ‘the semi-Amish not-quite-olds who can’t figure out technology,’ the implication being that anybody who knows better wouldn’t bother. CDs currently exist in a cultural no-man’s-land recently defined by singer-songwriter Todd Snider as ‘post-hip, pre-retro’ — the format is passé, but not so passé that it qualifies for reclamation.

CDs outsell vinyl records many times over, but CDs don’t have nearly the cachet or booster-ish press coverage.”

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“[It] will most certainly become a part of our everyday lives in the future”:

“Used CDs Are Worth Virtually Nothing Now”

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