I’m increasingly conscious of being an outlier here. I prefer physical, for a variety of reasons (ownership being one of them), but also prefer CD to vinyl. Nobody loves CDs any more and I don’t get it. I own vinyl, I like vinyl, but CDs are objectively better and somewhat easier to store.
I love both for different reasons.
CDs sound better, they can be ripped and archived and can be carried around without any loss in their digital form.
On the other hand, vinyl is great for intentional listening. Putting that hour aside to brew a nice cup of coffee and listen to something while exploring the feelings the album evoke, then get a break to flip/change the record and continue.
It's a kind of personal care for me. I even recently showed a little love to my old record player (an Akai AP-D210) so it can regulate its RPM better and play smoothly as it can.
I can argue that CDs are for listening to the music, and vinyl is for listening to yourself.
This resonates with me. I have a hobby where I transform classic books into hand-written papyrus as the author intended. There is something almost meditative in unspooling a 10kg scroll where the sometimes illegible ink allows me to wonder what that sentence even was.
So glad to see my people. I have a hobby where instead of a modern synthetic ball, I play soccer with a severed goat head. There is something positively transcendent about the resonating thunk of a kick that you just don’t get with a standard ball.
In my community, we use the head of the defeated chieftain of the nearby tribe instead, and keep goatheads for soup. The lack of horns makes for a better roll.
Funny how there are minor variations the world around.
I love the associated rituals and the physicality of vinyl records. The large format album art, liner notes & inserts are great as well. As for sound quality I'm no audiophile so I won't pretend to make any claims of vinyl being better or worse than any other music medium, but I will say I don't get the same intentionality of listening with the streaming services I've tried: Google music, Amazon music, Spotify, etc which all seem to mess with your library by injecting ridiculous things like AI DJ interludes or "enhancing" your playlists by injecting songs into your carefully curated playlists at random. That and I have some really old shit that I haven't been able to find on other mediums.
Both Google music (before it turned into YT Music) and Amazon Music briefly allowed uploading your own music to stream which significantly helped with my use-case, but they both removed that feature during their inevitable enshitification. I toyed with self hosting and doing my own rips of CDs and vinyl, but I find throwing on a record more relaxing than futzing with lossy encoder parameters or patching streaming servers.
I’ve never had Apple Music add random songs to my library and the closest thing to an AI DJ is AutoMix which is easily disabled and I’ve never had it re-enable itself. Can also add your own music to iCloud Music Library with the Apple Music app on Mac and (I think) Windows. Think this requires iCloud+ though but I’m not 100% certain. Annoyingly can’t do it on the web app or an iPhone :/
I don't think it requires an additional subscription. Apple music started as solely an "upload your music to play anywhere" service. I use apple music over the other offerings solely for this feature and for a large portion of it I didn't even have any apple devices and so didn't have iCloud+.
Good to know there's at least one sane streaming service option left out there, although at this point I'll stick to my physical media. I've been burned by music providers enough times to think that Apple will eventually follow the same path as the rest.
He’s reacting to an implication in your phrasing. “CDs are for listening to the music”. frames CDs as rational and objective. “Vinyl is for listening to yourself” reframes vinyl as something more inward and identity-driven. For many people, vinyl already sits in an intentionally irrational space compared to modern formats, worse fidelity, more friction, more ritual. So that line can be read as quietly calling vinyl navel-gazing or performative rather than about the music itself. Some readers find that observation insightful or funny, which is likely what prompted the “this is amazing” reaction, even if it wasn’t how you intended it.
these types of people used to be called “hipsters.” I don’t know if there’s a more modern term for it.
That’s what I guess he meant by “amazing” and also why it spawned the goat head and papyrus mockery.
Well, I interpreted the comment I responded in good faith. On the other hand, I respect and understand people who choose to mock me directly. Actually I'm pretty used to be mocked.
Being more serious, I think it depends on one's relationship with music itself, and I don't expect everyone to have the same relationship with it. Personally, I met with music at a very young age, and funnily I started with CDs and open-reel. Vinyl came into my normal rotation pretty late, after its availability started to increase.
I worded my comment exactly like that intentionally, because the unwritten context here is my vinyl collection is solely composed of albums I already love to listen, and dedicate some time listening to. As a person who also performed in the past, I also understand that my relationship with music is a bit different when compared to today's consumerism-centered approach.
So, if spending some time with a favorite album, enjoying it and respecting the effort went into its production is worthy of mockery and being labeled as a hipster or being backward, let it be. I don't personally care.
Same goes for pen and paper, actually, but it's a subject for another day.
Yeah, I’m sort of hopeful it’ll experience a similar resurgence to vinyl.
Despite being terminally online for literally decades now I never got out of CDs just because it always bugged me that I could buy a physical copy with better (or, nowadays, usually equivalent) sound quality for the same or less money than the MP3 (or whatever format) album.
I’d then invariably rip to a compressed format for convenient on the go listening but, in 20 odd years, I’ve bought maybe half a dozen albums digitally, and half of those have been simply because no other format is available. (For context, I have maybe 700 albums on CD but I lost accurate count some years ago so it could well be more.)
For me there is no point storing digital music on optical discs. Easier to steam it or listen from a hard drive.
On the other hand the larger format of vinyl and rather peculiar way it works scratches the “tactile” part of what makes physical attractive a lot more.
I loved CDs, but I was forced to stop buying new CDs decades ago because I can't stomach supporting the RIAA. That said, it is still my preferred physical media for music (followed by minidisc) even though ultimately my CD collection was digitized and stored.
I get you but there’s also an element of pick your poison. Not all the online options are great either, particularly not on the streaming front (cough, Spotify, cough[0]) in terms of their treatment - and payment - of artists. I think Bandcamp might be decent, and is generally the place I go for FLAC.
I buy a lot of pre-owned CDs as well: upside, less hard/impossible to recycle waste (discs), and less plastic waste (cases), doesn’t support the RIAA; downside, it also doesn’t support the artists. Somewhat regularly I find pre-owned is the only option though, at least if I want a physical copy.
[0] One could perhaps argue that the RIAA set the standard for turgid money grabbing scumbaggery that modern services have chosen to adopt, I think.
Yeah, I'll sometimes pick up used CDs. When it comes to supporting artists though it's hard. Occasionally you can support them directly online, but it's best to email to make sure that some percentage of that doesn't go to the label. Handing cash to artists in person at shows hasn't always worked either, and I get how that might make them uncomfortable. Merch sales (outside of albums) at concerts can work if you check with them first about where the proceeds go.
CDs are annoyingly delicate to handle. Vinyl does not care about your finger tips. Vinyl sleeves are also more attractive than CD cases and easier to store on a shelf or bucket.
That's simply not true. If you scratch a vinyl record, you've introduced a defect to it. If you scratch a CD, it's probably fine. Some CD players don't like scratched CDs, but for the most part CDs are very durable.
Plus if you damage a CD, simply rip it and burn it to a CDr. (did I mention that ripping a damaged CD usually works?)
You are right about vinyl sleeves being more attractive, though. I think that's its main selling point.
You can usually polish scratches out of CDs as well.
Where they’re actually much more vulnerable is on the printed side because the data layer sits just beneath that. Still more resilient than vinyl though, unless/until they get the dreaded rot.
They can also crack if dropped but that’s just as true of vinyl, if not moreso.
