Set your goals: Four decades of sticking with CDs

The oldest CD I own is Civ’s Set Your Goals. The album was released in 1995 and I got it from my uncle for Christmas that year. I had gotten a boom box for my birthday earlier that year and that’s when I started acquiring CDs, but the ones predating Set Your Goals are long gone (special thanks to my brother for ratting out my copy of The Downward Spiral and its parental advisory sticker, leading to its confiscation and subsequent re-acquiring some time later). Three decades is a long time to have anything and I don’t know how many times I’ve listened to this album. Enough to have not just single “Can’t Wait One Minute More” burned into my brain but also the chorus of “Boring Summer” and the live intro to “Trust Slips Through Your Hands.” “LUKE FROM WARZONE WROTE IT! GIVE A HAND FOR LUKE, JESUS CHRIST WHAT ARE YOU A BUNCH OF PUSSIES!” Walter Schreifels yells and I have forgotten a lot of shit in 30 years but I will never not remember that Luke from Warzone wrote this song.

The reason these songs are in my head is because they could be put there. A CD is not a vinyl record, digital decay is real, but it is still an extremely durable medium for music. And while my Set Your Goals CD has seen better days, it still plays now and played every time I wanted it to before, over the 90s and 00s and 10s and 20s. This is true for all of the CDs I’ve acquired over the years — my current total is around 1,000 — from the copy of Licensed To Ill that sits next to Set Your Goals in one of my 220-disc wallets, to the Whimbrels’ new self-titled album I picked up at a show earlier this year, to the mid-2000s Tarbox Ramblers album I snagged at a used CD store a month ago.

I practically lived at the used CD stores in my suburban area as a teen in the 90s, buying and trading and scouring stacks. A not-insignificant factor in deciding to go to Boston University was proximity to the still-extant Nuggets Records and its piles of albums, and the Hub in the early aughts was still a cornucopia of used CD stores. But like any 00s-era college student I was also downloading songs left and right on Napster and while I never forsook CDs (and many of those downloads would be burned to disc), enough of my peers over the years did. Many stores closed and stalwart chains like Newbury Comics moved into gewgaws and collectibles, with vinyl slotting into the latter. It’s wild to walk into a store now and see more LPs than CDs, all selling for $30-50 a pop in a markup that puts the bad old days of 90s CD prices to shame.

But the used CD store is apparently going through a renaissance. New ones have popped up in Boston to complement the survivors from 20 years ago. And as someone who has been browsing all that time, the market seems to be at a high point. Generational shifts may be at play here — I suspect folks older than me may be offloading their collections (by choice or by estate sale) and juicing the supply with previously unavailable discs. In the article linked above, Neptoon Records manager Ben Frith theorizes that cars with CD players are making their way down the ownership chain and partially driving interest in driving to albums (I physically feel ill at the thought of my 2010 Camry and its CD player giving up the ghost). And generationally, a cohort interested in 90s music can feast on CDs; you don’t need to borrow my copy of Sugar’s File Under Easy Listening because a disc is waiting for you at literally any store. The glut of physical production for bands that era — and for earlier albums that could be re-released on CD — has led to the sweet spot of both high supply and high demand, where a store can comfortably sell old Springsteen CDs for $5 and still come out ahead and the budget-conscious listener can buy those albums and feel like they got a good deal.

Because why would they not? A person listens to music for any number of reasons and how they listen to that music is subject to emotional and economic and social concerns. I have no idea why young people like CDs. But I do know why I like CDs. If I had Spotify I could listen to a collection of music that would dwarf the albums in my collection. Or I could create a playlist, “Songs that Luke from Warzone wrote,” and play it more times in a month than I’ve heard Set Your Goals and “Trust Slips Through Your Hands” in 30 years. Of course, that collection is full of AI garbage and stolen tracks that are used to juice a greedy asshole Swede’s stock, the streamers use the word “library” as a lie to cover their extractive purpose. And that playlist would be determined by me but not owned by me, its songs existing in that format I’m using due to the ever-changing whims of record labels that have been in the greedy asshole business even longer than the Swede. Trust slips through your hands, so I’ve been told.

Why deal with the rent-seekers and the extractors? They will always be a part of recorded music but they can be kept at arm’s length. I like that I take the CD from where I have it in my house (or car) and I put it in the CD player and I listen to the music on the CD. There are no ads (although there may be skits), there is no outside meddler pushing a different artist on me, there is no need for a connection beyond a plug into a wall. It’s just me and the music.

“Technology is cyclical,” Dennis Duffy says in 30 Rock as he launches his beeper business in 2006. As usual, Dennis is half right. Technology remains the same, it’s us humans that are cyclical. What we value shifts and slides, favoring new advances before remembering what older modes had to offer. I’ve been around long enough for my CD collection to have come back into vogue, but it has always had worth. So give a hand for CDs! Jesus Christ, what are you, a bunch of pussies?