What Do I Do With My CDs?

A Reflection

In the 2000s, I often sat on the edge of my bed facing my CD player. I had nowhere else to be. No notifications, no infinite scroll, no algorithms force-feeding me slop. Just the album: a dozen tracks, a booklet to flip through, and the determination to love the music because I’d spent twenty bucks on it.

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

Maybe I was determined because of the effort involved. For me and my friends, music wasn’t just there, like it is today. The internet existed, but it was slow; it wasn’t yet the global jukebox but just a hyperlinked rumour mill. Anonymous prophets on music forums would herald the best new bands coming from England, the United States, Europe. In the antipodes, my friends and I spent the school week discussing these bands, awaiting the weekend when we could get our hands on their new albums.

We couldn’t get them unless we went into town, and the trip was something like a pilgrimage. As I’ve written elsewhere, in those days I principally devoted to metal, so I travelled to the aptly-named Utopia Records, Australia’s largest heavy metal specialists. I first encountered this establishment opposite the University of Sydney (where I was nominally a student) but it later moved to the city. The shop is now underground, and a bit malodorous: appropriately dungeonesque. Entering felt like the initiation to a fraternity, and even if you didn’t buy anything you could still chat to the staff about music – what do you think of the new album? Anyone good touring this year? It was a special language, and we even had something like a dress code: black, preferably with a band’s name on the front. Now, like everyone else, I wear a suit to the office but it’s not really a club I want to be in.

I would spend hours flipping through the racks of CDs, weighing my options, comparing possibilities. I usually had a pretty good idea of what I wanted, but that glittering Aladdin’s cave expanded my musical cosmos. Sometimes I would take a risk on an album because I’d heard about it online, or just because I liked the cover. The journey home always seemed slow, my bag weighed down with records and expectations.

With only a limited collection, you listened to records repeatedly, even if you didn’t like them at first. I usually listened to new albums ten or twenty times over a weekend before deciding what I thought about them. Some of my favourites were ones I didn’t like at first. I bought Dream Theater’s Metropolis Pt. 2: Scenes from a Memory because it had been highly praised, but on first listen I found it too complex, labyrinthine. I consigned it to some forgotten spot. Months later, I rediscovered it during what must have been a rare cleaning initiative, and decided to give it another spin. This time, the music hit me with the force of a revelation. Even today, I think I know every note of that record by heart.

And even today, although I stream almost everything, feeling effortlessly entitled like a later Roman emperor, the albums I have the strongest connection to are ones I bought a copy of ten or twenty years ago. Yes, I love the ease of streaming. I love that I don’t have to ring around and import CDs from America, as I once did. I love that I can listen to music from anywhere at any time.

CDs were clunky, vexatious things. I hated those cheap flimsy cases that snapped as soon as you opened them. I hated those little fake spokes in the middle that broke as soon as you touched them. I hated those plastic seals that ruined my fingernails and never ever came off. But I loved the rites of buying and listening to CDs. Some bands really cared about the artwork and packaging of their albums, and some included hidden messages or odd “thank you” notes. Metal lyrics – especially those of European bands – are often strange and arcane; poring over tiny printed texts taught me a lot of unusual vocabulary and was great preparation for my later study of poetry. Even learning about the band members (who played what) and the technical personnel (engineers, producers) made it easier to connect with the album and the wider musical world.

This is the immersive richness a physical album could offer: the careful listening, the slow, unfolding attachment – the way a record could start as an eccentric curiosity and months later become an inseparable part of who you were. As in a romantic relationship, there were always small, essential burdens of patience and attention: listening was a way of opening up to something you hoped might change you. In a world obsessed with control, it was a rare act of surrender.

I still listen to plenty of new music but I’m beginning to think it won’t mean as much to me anymore. Maybe nothing will: in our decadent culture, everything heads towards ease, efficiency, and a numbing of experience. What was once bound up with materiality and ritual and journey has been made cloudy and ephemeral, an endless outpour of digital bits leaving no impression on the soul. And so I wonder if, in the age of streaming, it's possible to truly love an album experienced only in digital form, or if we treat it as we treat everything else: consume, discard.

No, I don’t miss CDs, but I miss the world where they mattered: where music wasn’t just background noise or an item on a playlist or something to shuffle past to get to something new, but something that settled into your life and affected how you perceived things for a while. I miss that knowledge and that intimacy.

Maybe I’m being nostalgic, and this is my way of making my teenage years seem more significant than they really were. Or maybe – just maybe – we’ve traded the prismatic diamond of charmed appreciation for the gaudy trinket of convenience.