Still buying CDs in 2026

2026-02-10

I used to use Spotify. I was on the Free plan, so I could only listen to music on shuffle, and I had a limited number of skips each hour. It basically turned my music listening experience into a slot machine, pulling the lever six times to see if I'd get one of the songs I wanted from each playlist. At some point, I also noticed that playlist shuffle song sequences would repeat, with some songs always coming after other songs in a predictable way. Others have had this issue too. Even if it was a deliberate design choice, I disagree with it. If shuffle isn't truly random, why label it as shuffle in the first place? I'm sure I would have had a far better experience if I paid for Spotify Premium, but as a high school student with no income, it wasn't possible for me at the time.

Shortly after I graduated high school, I deleted my Spotify account and decided to start collecting CDs. I wanted to "own" my music, and I personally prefer buying CDs to buying digital albums. I can pick up a CD, read the booklet it (usually) comes with, and use it. It's like functional merch for my favorite artists, and even brand new, it's usually around the same price or only slightly more expensive than the digital version of the album. If you buy the CD used, it might even be cheaper. I've bought CDs for literally 25 cents that I ended up enjoying. I recommend checking library sales, garage sales, thrift stores, and record stores.

I usually listen to albums that my friends recommended on services like YouTube (Music) and Bandcamp, track my listens with Last.fm, and then buy the CDs of the albums I listened to the most so I could back them up and listen to them in full quality, offline, with no ads. For me, buying a CD motivates me to give the whole album a try, not just the best-known tracks. I sometimes discovered that I liked almost every song on albums I only listened to two or three tracks of on Spotify. Other times, I realized that an album that didn't have many songs I liked when listening to individual songs actually sounded great when it was listened to all together.

Of course, buying CDs means I spend money anyway. As of right now, base Spotify Premium is $13 per month (I could get a student discount, but if I paid for Premium, I would probably end up doing it long term). The CDs I buy new are usually around $10-12 each, so instead of listening to any of the millions of songs available on Spotify's catalogs, I get to add about 10 new songs to my "catalog" per month. This seems like a bad deal, but I tend to listen to the same albums over and over again, so it's not like I would take advantage of the whole Spotify catalog anyway. Also, if the price increased so much I was no longer willing to pay it, features I care about were moved to higher paid tiers, or I just decided to stop using Spotify, I would have nothing to show for the money I'd spent over the years.

What about music discovery?

It's true that I discovered some of my current favorite artists through Spotify recommendations and playlists. But more often than not, I would only listen to the few songs that got recommended to me, not the rest of the artist's discography. Since my free plan had limited skips and played plenty of ads, I usually just tried to listen to my favorite songs before I ran out of skips or the ads got too annoying. I didn't want to waste skips or waste time listening to ads just to hear a song that I ended up not liking.

I bought my first CD ("I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got" by Sinéad O'Connor) at a used item sale right before my first semester began. I recognized the artist's name, and the CD only cost a dollar, so I decided to take a chance on the album and bought it. I didn't have a CD player at my dorm yet, so I looked up the album online. I ended up listening to "Nothing Compares 2 U" on repeat. This song, and album, probably never would have been recommended to me by Spotify's algorithm because I mostly listen to upbeat pop and electronic music.

Spotify is not the only way to discover music. Many of my all-time favorite albums were recommended to me by my friends. There's no shortage of music critics and articles online who usually have their own recommendations. Sometimes I find interesting new albums by browsing Bandcamp's top sold albums in my favorite genres. Even if you would prefer a personalized music algorithm based on your own listening tastes, Last.fm has worked ok for me and lets me aggregate my listening from many different platforms (There are also self hosted options.)

Buying CDs vs. digital albums

If 99% of the time I listen to my CD backup (through my self hosted streaming or iPod) and not directly from the CD itself, why do I bother buying the CD, which takes up valuable shelf space and can't be delivered instantaneously?

Services like Bandcamp, Qobuz, and occasionally some artist websites let you buy music files. (I don't count services where you "buy" music that is then locked to their proprietary platform as "buying" music unless you can get the actual files with no DRM. I don't want to rely on a service that could get shut down some day and then lose all of my purchased music.)

If I chose to buy music files instead of CDs, I could skip the part where I go to a store in person/wait for my CD to get delivered and back up the CD, and skip straight to adding the album to my streaming and iPod. This has some benefits: not needing the cardboard and plastic of the CD and its packaging, saving shelf space, avoiding shipping costs and environmental effects, and less effort on my part.

In many (not all) cases, the digital album music files cost as much as a brand new CD would, or even slightly more. This may be worth it to you if the files are 24-bit FLACs compared to only 16-bit CD quality, but personally I can't usually tell the difference, and CD quality is good enough for me. More importantly, if I'm already paying $10+, I prefer to have something physical for that money, something I can hold. I only consider buying digital files if the CD has limited availability (especially when combined with high shipping costs from the few available sources) or the digital files are significantly cheaper than the CD.