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The CD Is Back… But Not For The Music

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.

Mitch Joel · The CD Is Back… But Not For The Music – The Elias Makos Show – CJAD 800

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Mitch Joel

Mitch Joel lives at the intersection of technology, business transformation and consumer culture. He is the Executive Director of Next Era Institute, a strategic intelligence platform helping leaders understand the forces reshaping business, technology, culture and society. The Institute identifies which shifts matter, explores their wider significance and translates them into strategic direction and momentum. Mitch is also a globally recognized keynote speaker. He has delivered thousands of presentations across both B2B and B2C industries to organizations including Google, Walmart, LEGO, Shopify, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Strategy Magazine has called him “one of North America’s leading visionaries.” Mitch built his career by working directly inside the waves of change that reshaped modern business. He founded and built a digital marketing agency that worked with some of the world’s largest brands and was later acquired by WPP, where he served as President of a firm operating in 25 countries with almost 3,000 employees. Mitch is the bestselling author of Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete, and the host of Thinking With Mitch Joel, one of the longest-running business podcasts in the world. His writing and commentary appear in outlets including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Inc. Magazine. He is a member of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar. Mitch also hosts Groove – The No Treble Podcast, documenting the oral history of electric bass players. Mitch is also Co-Founder of ThinkersOne, a platform that enables companies to bring personalized thought leadership from world-class experts into meetings, events and off-sites in focused 15-minute bursts.