Tucked away on the second floor of the Berry Library, the Jones Media Center is a valuable tool for campus creatives. Students can borrow production equipment, book an editing suite or even record a podcast. But I love the JMC for a different reason: its extensive collection of high-quality CDs.
It’s hard for college students these days to appreciate the once-mighty legacy of the compact disc. After all, CDs have been virtually obsolete for the lifetimes of even our oldest students. Yet once upon a time, they reigned supreme. In 2000, U.S. CD sales peaked at a staggering 950 million units, but they swiftly fell soon after. The medium began to face competition from peer-to-peer file-sharing services like Napster, then from iTunes and the iPod. The following decade, streaming services like Spotify absolutely decimated CD sales. By 2020, annual sales bottomed out at 31.6 million units — a decline of over 95% from its peak.
This collapse was sad yet inevitable. CDs couldn’t compete with the variety, convenience and the bang-for-your-buck value of streaming. But this near extinction of physical media threatens to wipe out its irreplaceable qualities. There’s something special about touching your music — picking up a record, cassette or CD, putting it in a player and watching it spin to life. It’s more than just the sound; it’s the tangible experience. The magic lives in the small details: liner notes, extra album art and original versions of songs scrubbed from streaming services.
Finding the original release of an album on streaming services is surprisingly difficult. Spotify and Apple Music love to repackage albums that have existed untouched for decades, and they rarely make them better. Take the 1983 New Order album “Power, Corruption & Lies,” which only appears on Apple Music as a “Definitive Edition.” What makes this version so definitive? The original iconic artwork — the 19th century painting “A Basket of Roses” by Henri Fantin-Latour — is missing, replaced by a generic pink cover. The album’s eight tracks have swollen to twenty-six, and the extra eighteen tracks are mostly outtakes and demos. While these demos are cool, they also upset the album’s continuity: Most listeners probably don’t want to hear three different takes of the song “Blue Monday” in a row.
These infuriating, bloated reissues aren’t how most artists wanted their albums to be heard. Yet since few artists own the rights to their catalogs, they have little control. If a record company believes they can squeeze a little more cash out of a reissue, they’ll do it. This is the key advantage physical media has over streaming: once it’s been released, it cannot be altered. While many physical music releases these days are greedy reissues — like a Kiss 50th Anniversary CD boxset that went on sale this month for nearly $300 — there are other ways to reap all the benefits that CDs offer without the cost and quality downsides: buying CDs secondhand.
While the vinyl revival of the 2010s has essentially ended the days of finding cheap secondhand records, used CDs are still a relatively underdeveloped market. And depending on which era of music you enjoy, it may be a gold mine. By the late ’80s, vinyl had effectively been killed off by the CD, so a majority of the music of the past four decades exists solely on compact discs. This is great news for Grunge-era music lovers, at any Goodwill — or the Upper Valley’s chain of Listen thrift stores — you’ll practically trip over cheap copies of ’90s classics, like Alanis Morrisette’s “Jagged Little Pill” and R.E.M.’s “Automatic for the People.”
I’ve been able to connect deeply with this era of music, hunting for CDs at thrift stores, finding hidden gems from the ’80s and ’90s that don’t appear in streaming algorithms. And for more elusive CDs, thrifting offers the thrill of the hunt. The joy of finding a CD you’ve been searching for at a thrift store is so much greater than what you feel from playing it on Spotify. There’s a real sense of accomplishment in finding a copy of an album you love. And no matter how any record company or streaming service decides to alter that album in the future, your CD will preserve just how it sounded the day it was released.
For those uninterested in embarking on a thrifting adventure, the Jones Media Center offers an entirely free way to enjoy physical media. Right past the circulation desk is an entire wall of metal cabinets filled with incredible CDs, most of which likely haven’t been played in decades. So go take a look — you can check out any CD for a year. Find an album your parents love and show it to them at Thanksgiving, and they’ll be transported back to their own college years. Or pick an album at random and expand your musical horizons. CDs are special, and it’s up to us to keep them alive.
Opinion articles represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
