CDs are back… which is weird… in a “vinyl was cool”… cassettes less so kind of way…

Vinyl? I get it (I am of that age). There’s the ritual… the turntable… the sound… the album art (oh, the album art)… the very deliberate act of choosing a record, sliding on a pair of big honking headphones… putting it on and… just… listening. When cassettes crawled back from wherever we left them alongside our Walkmans and pencils used for rewinding them… I was skeptical of their ability to remain interesting from either a collectible or an audiophile perspective… but CDs?

According to recent reports, CD sales are suddenly growing again.

TechCrunch reported a significant jump in sales during the first half of 2026, driven in no small part by younger consumers. At first blush, this feels like another chapter in our ongoing retro-tech obsession (wired headphones for your iPhone, anyone?). Everything digital has become so ephemeral that perhaps people are craving something physical again. Something you can hold… something you can own… something that isn’t rented from an algorithm through a monthly streaming subscription.

Feels like nostalgia meets ownership.

Except there’s one small problem with that conclusion… a lot of the people buying CDs don’t own CD players. Wait… what? If you’re buying music without owning the technology required to actually play it… maybe you’re not really buying the music at all. You’re buying something else… because the one thing you definitely aren’t doing with that CD is listening to it.

Just push play.

The friction of listening is basically gone. Almost every song ever recorded is sitting inside the phone in your pocket (or on YouTube). You don’t need a CD… cassette… or record player to listen to the music. You don’t even need to own anything… you just press play… so why buy the CD?

Merchandising.

I was at the Rush Fifty Something tour last week, and the lineup for the pop-up outdoor merch store was multiples longer than then line to get into the show (have you seen the price of concert t-shirts lately?). Taylor Swift turned concert merchandise into its own cultural and economic phenomenon. People want the shirt… the poster… the limited edition… the physical thing that says, “I was there… I love this… this is me.” Didn’t Swift sell tickets just for access to her merch… and people still waited hours in line once they got there?

Think about that… the merchandise has now became its own event.

Just look at K-pop, where CDs come packaged with collectible photos, stickers, special artwork and other exclusives. The disc may “technically” contain the music, but that’s almost beside the point. Fans already have the music. What they’re buying is the artifact… the shrine. And that’s a very different business. The CD used to be how you got the music. Now that the music is everywhere, the CD has to give you something the stream can’t. Something physical… collectible… scarce… yours. I guess I’m showing my age because CDs really felt like technology. They were technology. And once a newer technology took hold, the CD stopped needing to be useful… it became a coaster and dust collector. Maybe that’s why this story rattled me… CDs aren’t making a comeback as physical media at all… they’ve come blazing back as a merchandising option that sits next to trucker hats and koozies. We stream the music… we see the show… we buy the merch and somehow the CD has moved from the first category into the last.

That might be the strangest part of the CD comeback… the technology came back because we no longer need the technology.

This (and some other topics) is what we discussed on CJAD 800 AM this week.

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