Just a ramble about CDs...
2004 was the year I technically began to collect CDs. I have no regrets for choosing CDs as my primary choice of musical format. Vinyl seems to be many peoples' preference these days, but I don't remember the whole vinyl revival happening until around 2010... I could be wrong, but when I take a step back and look at things, I don't remember seeing vinyl LPs in shops again until I'd hit my late teens/early 20s. In fact, where I live in the UK (which is a town with a large population, but not big enough to qualify as a city), I don't remember even having any independent record stores until the mid-2010s. I'm sure we probably did pre-2000, but I was just a kid and didn't start buying albums until I was 12 or 13. And at that time we just had stores like HMV, MVC etc. (in fact, we still have HMV to this day, even if it has relocated about 4 times since I was at school), the kind of shop that would sell plenty of CDs, but I'd hazard a guess they made most of their sales from all the DVDs and video games they also sold.
I don't remember a time when CDs were ever hard to find in stores, but I do quite clearly remember MP3 players and iPods becoming a big deal in my teenage school years. Most of the kids I went to school with weren't really buying CDs... they were downloading MP3 tracks illegally on LimeWire! And I vividly remember a lot people thinking that any kind of physical music format would soon be obsolete and unavailable as new purchases. This thought even crossed my mind a few times, and I was quite fearful of it considering I'd only been collecting a couple of years or so at that point. Of course, CDs never disappeared in the end, but they most definitely were not selling all that well in the mid-2000s, even if they were generally not hard to obtain. Independent record stores were really hard to find outside of big cities then however, like I said.
Anyhow, I started buying CDs for a number of reasons. For starters, I discovered the music I loved and still love to this day of course. It's such a big deal for me personally that I don't think the average person really understands just how important music is to people like me. But anyway, another reason for collecting CDs was also because they were the format most easy to obtain at the time. As stated in the first paragraph, vinyl was wayyy harder to find back then, and cassettes almost impossible by that point. If I'd started with vinyl, I honestly think my collection would only be about 60% the size it is today. Although I do still pick up LPs sometimes, I like to look long and hard in person at their condition before I purchase, whereas brand new vinyl is often absurdly expensive nowadays and I only ever buy them as an occasional treat for myself. The price of a newly-released album in new condition on vinyl is often the price of 3 or 4 brand new copies of the same album on CD. I just can't justify it sometimes.
I will say that I do sometimes really dig dropping the needle on my turntable, and flipping the record over when side 1 is finished - as opposed to simply popping a CD in my player and pressing a button. But I do not necessarily agree with the whole "vinyl sounds better" frame of mind. I do like the little crackles you get sometimes, it gives me more of an organic vibe. But as far maximum sound quality goes, I think CDs are superior. Sometimes I don't want to hear the actual equipment sounds of my stereo/turntable... I just want to hear the music, if that makes any sense!! So vinyl is definitely a mood-dependent kind of format for me.
Ha! I came into this blog post hoping to blindly write about CDs... I wasn't actually intending to debate both vinyl and CD, so I'm gonna try to move back towards general chit-chat about my thoughts and experiences with CDs now.
I think, if you're passionate about certain genres that aren't quite your typical mainstream flavours, CDs (well, or any format for that matter) tend to hold more sentimental value. I mean, when are you ever gonna stumble across, say, a Saxon CD in a charity shop (or thrift store if you're American)?! The answer of course, is never! You'll be flicking through endless Madonna, Ed Sheeran and Adele CDs before you find anything even remotely close to rock... and when you do you'll be lucky to find an Oasis or U2 album. And the funny thing is, while there's a whole load of obscure bands that no one will ever have heard of unless they're passionate about the same music as me, most of my absolute favourite bands are the better-known artists of their genre. Yet I've never seen a Black Sabbath, Deep Purple or Judas Priest CD in a charity shop - ever. And when I do stumble upon used copies in actual record stores, you can betcha they'll be priced much higher than 99p.
Again, independent record stores - they're much easier to find now, and spread out all over the country. My town has had 3 since roughly 2016, and I'd have been overjoyed if any of them had been around during my school years. But obviously I was stuck with the big chain shops for a long time to begin with. And to be fair, they did the job at the time. I didn't start delving into more obscure artists until my late teens, so I'd often be walking home from town with a purchase I was happy with. In fact, I sometimes used to hop on the train to Birmingham in my school years, because their HMV was so much larger and had infinitely more choice of CDs (but almost zero vinyl from what I can recall). By the time I was 18 however, I was a ginormous metalhead and attended Bloodstock Open Air festival for the very first time. I remember coming home from it with a huge stack of hardcore metal CDs, most of which you'd never find in any HMV. Yep, they've always had a big metal market made up of multiple stalls selling merch, vinyl and CDs in the main arena. I've bought a chunk of my discs from Bloodstock.
The biggest and most obvious place to buy CDs is of course, online. I didn't have my own debit or credit cards until was 18 and working full-time... this was a primary reason why I used to visit HMV or MVC for such a long time. Sometimes I'd get my mum to order stuff from Amazon, then pay her back - but I didn't start buying CDs online regularly until I was 18. For a very, very long time I would buy the vast majority of my CDs from Amazon Marketplace. To be honest, unless I'm buying a newly-released album, I never cared if I was buying second-hand or not. As long as the disc was in good condition along with the case and booklet/inlays, I was happy (and saving a hell of a lot money in the process). And I still am... the difference being nowadays is that I very rarely buy anything from Amazon Marketplace anymore. There's a few reasons why I don't buy from them much anymore, the first and most obvious choice being that there seems to be fewer and fewer choice these days when I do look there. Like, I remember there being a huge list of UK sellers selling whatever CD I was interested in, with some crazy cheap offers. Doesn't seem to be the case anymore, unless I'm just not looking at the right CDs?
I gradually shifted to eBay more as the years have passed. At least you can actually see the album you're buying there, and the prices seem to be much cheaper overall. True, you do see those big chain sellers on eBay, and they post stock photos of items rather than the actual thing you're buying - so more often than not I tend to lean more towards smaller sellers and pay that little bit extra for security reasons. But occasionally I will still chance it and buy from the bigger sellers on eBay such as Chalkys or Badlands and 95% of the time all is good. Dispatch and delivery are much slower is all.
A lot of people buy CDs and vinyl from Discogs. I agree that Discogs is brilliant in that you can find almost anything on there. However, I've only bought a few CDs here and there from them, the reason being that there's always a lack of UK sellers. You'll see a disc up for sale at a reasonable asking price from somewhere like the US, but then the postage is so steep that the whole thing doubles in price. I can only assume Discogs is awesome depending on where you live in the world. Unless I'm doing something obviously wrong, as a Brit it's rarely my first choice.
In terms of CD packaging format - jewel case, digipak etc., I'm gonna say that my favourite will always be the simple jewel case. They're clean, the booklet slots in nicely and if you look after and store them properly they last forever. I can't stand those thin, flimsy cardboard sleeves that replicate LPs, but I do kinda like some of the digipaks in my collection - if done correctly that is. And I really do like those book format CDs. For example, the Deluxe edition version of the newly released Invincible Shield by Judas Priest - very nice. When I'm just sat staring at my collection (which is probably more often than I should!), I sometimes just randomly grab the fancier packaged albums for a looksee. Weirdly, being able to clearly read the side of each album is a big deal for me, hence why I like jewel cases and not thin cardboard sleeves. Although I will say that every so often you'll find a jewel case with the side text facing the opposite direction, reading upwards instead of downwards - and it annoys me... it must be a weird OCD quirk of mine!
I also quite like box sets, although I don't own too many. Some are small enough to fit in alongside all my regular discs, others are huge and are stored on a shelf. I don't often go out of my way to buy box sets in truth - I tend to pick them up if they're too good to miss or if they're priced very reasonably - but I do think they're neat more often than not. I love my 30th Anniversary Super Deluxe box set of Def Leppard's Hysteria, for instance. It's a thing of beauty, and packed full of cool shit. I've also pre-ordered the recently-announced Black Sabbath box set, Anno Domini 1989-1995. It's been in talks for years now, and it's finally being released at the end of May this year. Yeah, I've owned all the albums inside it forever, but the Tony Martin era is hugely underrated, I'm a die hard Sabbath fan and it also comes with the newly-remixed Forbidden, which I'm dying to hear. So yeah.
Like vinyl, a lot of CDs have various different releases throughout their history. When it comes to original releases, remasters, deluxe versions etc., I can't really say I have a specific preference. Sometimes original releases can sound better, other times I like the remaster. For example, those 2004 Megadeth remixes of their older albums are horrible in comparison to their original counterparts. Every fan knows this. But then you've a remaster like Iggy Pop's 1997 remix of the Stooges' Raw Power, which absolutely slays it's original mix by David Bowie. For the most part however, I think the vast majority of remasters are just fine when it comes to CDs, but I normally don't prioritise one or the other; if I end up with an older pressing over a remaster, then that's fine by me. And vice versa of course.
Obviously some reissues/special editions come with bonus tracks or even a bonus disc. I love it when unreleased studio tracks are featured as bonus songs - even if they aren't great, at least they're polished. What I'm not so keen on are demo tracks thrown in as bonus songs. Only in very rare circumstances are demo cuts better than their finished studio counterparts. They can be interesting, I'll give them that. But sometimes you'll buy a deluxe edition of an album, and the entire bonus disc is full of demos and outtakes. For example, a few years ago I bought the 2009 deluxe edition of Black Sabbath's self-titled debut, to go alongside my old standard copy which I've had forever. The bonus disc is made up entirely of studio outtakes, alternative versions and instrumentals of the tracks from the finished album. I think I listened to it once, and I don't think I ever will again. What I like as bonus material is more original studio songs (as I said), live tracks or even re-recordings of oldies to hear them from a modern perspective.
I gotta admit, I don't really know where I'm going with this post... I guess I just wanted to talk about CDs and my association with them. I'm just glad they never went away, despite everything that's happened in the last 20 or so years - MP3s, iPods, streaming services... nope, CDs are still here and alive and well at that. And if you look in the right places, I don't think the prices have even changed all that much - unlike vinyl. Cassettes have also made a comeback which I think is cool as hell even if I have no interest in ever collecting them. Either way, I'm quite happy with the number of CDs in my collection now. It'll never be big enough of course, but the 15 year old me would pass out if he saw the collection I've amassed now that I'm 31 (almost 32).
