In 2021, CD sales increased for the first time in 17 years. This is the first increase since 2004. Yes, It’s mainly because of Adele, whose album sold nearly 900,000 CDs along side BTS, and Taylor Swift….. So is this really a revival, or it just that there are quite a few big releases in one year?
If you look closely at the numbers, you’ll see that Adele had the best sales week for CDs when she moved 378,000 copies of 30 immediately upon release. The week before that, Taylor Swift had the second best week for CDs when she sold 146,700 copies of her album, Red (Taylor’s Version). These are two of the biggest stars and they don’t put releases out every year, so you could say that this is an anomaly, because removing the sales of just these two artists means that CD sales would have declined again for another year.
But is that a fair argument? If we believed everything that we read, The CD is dead, has been written off and cast aside as a dying format. But, it’s still selling over 40 million units a year and the difference of a few hundred thousand CDs means it’s actually pretty steady as a format.
Compact discs are not a sexy format, they are about functionality. They contain a set amount of information that’s easy to consume, no getting up every 20 mins to change sides. The sound is big, loud and at one point the CD became the most popular format ever.
One of the knocks against CDs is that the format is associated with a bloated era of the music industry in the late ’90s and early ’00s, For millennials and zoomers old enough to remember a pre-Spotify world, CDs are those over-priced plastic coasters that they stopped buying when cheaper and more convenient technology emerged. There is nothing cool about them.
Vinyl, meanwhile, is the format that several generations discovered from their parents or cool friends. It is linked with romantic notions of an “authentic” past, when you could simply sit back and relax in your living room with an album and absorb music in 20-minute intervals without all of the distractions that make modern life maddening. Vinyl — a format that otherwise is absurdly inconvenient and sounds good only if you have a good (and often expensive) turntable — is all about cool.
Discovering the joys of physical media, is down to there being something transitory about streaming culture, where any music you “have” is at the mercy of corporate whims. A couple of years ago, MySpace accidentally erased all the music ever uploaded to the site, with one push of a button.
Physical media also involves the artists getting paid. And here’s where CDs have an edge over other formats: They’re cheaper and faster to produce, a major issue in the current Great Vinyl Famine These days, there just aren’t enough pressing plants to keep up with consumer demand for vinyl. Independent artists pioneered the analog resurgence, but now they often get trapped in the vinyl bottleneck, waiting up to a year for their albums to get released, because they’re stuck waiting for a plant to slot them in to the long queues to press.
CDs are definitely not nostalgic and are something that could literally save independent music. We’re not saying people should stop buying and collecting vinyl, just consider buying CDs. The turnaround on manufacturing CDs is around 3 weeks and this can easily alleviate the pressure on bands with vinyl-loving fans that stock up only on that format. (Remember: It’s not Adele or Taylor Swift’s fault that there’s a vinyl shortage. It’s the demand from vinyl buyers who will only ever buy vinyl.) If we all buy CDs while we wait 6 months for the vinyl version, maybe we can have a real CD revival and put some money in the pockets of independent artists who are, just like the fans, waiting for their vinyl to be released.
Source: Rolling Stone: www.rollingstone.com. Uproxx: uproxx.com
