My ex used to collect a ton of CDs still; contrary to what some would have us believe, there's still a considerable desire for physical media, increasingly so actually as subscription and streaming fatigue worsens.

Gen Z in particular is increasingly leaning into retro technology apparently, as young people grow increasingly disenchanted with the current digital landscape:

https://rtiresearch.com/2026/03/10/cd-sales-gen-z/

I remember years and years ago they said its game over for dvds and cds,heck it was already game over for cassete's
And here we are all of them selling more and more you know why? Because people want to OWN what they like!

Sony doesnt have a single noteworty excuse to end physical media

Good sign of renaissance.

Young people are waking up to the fact that digital media is a scam.  The main issue I have with music CDs is simply finding new music that I like.  Most of the time when I find good "new to me" music, it's 20th century music, with early 21st century music being the rare exceptions.

I just bought a CD from Barnes & Noble a couple of weeks ago. They're still readily available at various retailers, both brick & mortar and online. Same for vinyl. Looking at album sales in general during the 2000s & 2010s, you'd assume the line would just continue to decline to zero. But that's not what happened. The decline stopped, and there's been a rebound from the late 2010s lows. According to the RIAA, last year there were 46.8M vinyl records and 29.5M CDs sold in just the U.S., for a total of 76.3M units, up from the all-time low of 56.8M units in 2020. According to the IFPI (the international music industry trade association the RIAA is party to), worldwide physical music sales amounted to $5.3B in revenue in 2025, up from the all-time low of $3.7B in 2020. So, proportionally speaking there has been a significant rebound in physical music sales. The industry is still dominated by digital distribution (primarily streaming music these days), but physical is still holding on as a strong niche. Interestingly, digital never became a majority of sales for whole albums. What digital did was simply transition people's buying habits from buying albums to buying digital singles, and now to mainly streaming (which is a kind of substitute for radio). Digital albums were only 16.4% of album sales last year in the U.S. When people want to buy a whole album, they overwhelmingly choose physical.

It's almost like people still like actually owning things, even if only as an option (take note, video games industry). They may be pickier with their purchases because they have the option to be pickier. Buying a whole $10-15 CD for just one or two songs you like only to find you didn't like much of the rest meant buying albums based just on the singles is a big risk. Also, it's likely that many if not most people only wanted the singles but CDs were more cost-effective than buying the single (which often cost upward of half the price of the album). But then iTunes came out and you could buy just the one or two singles you like for $1 a piece. Also, music is often listened to on the go, and digital has a definite edge, as you could carry hundreds of mp3s on a single device, and now you can stream whatever songs you like with custom playlists. But people still love physical albums, and are buying somewhere to the tune (heh) of a couple hundred million units per year.

Wait, more vinyls sold that CDs? That's definitely a surprise to me. I knew vinyls were popular but I had no idea about how popular exactly they were.

Yeah it's kinda frustrating lol. My favorite artist atm only releases on Vinyl, I have a CD player in the car, can't play records while driving! But I found a (likely bootleg) set of 6 CDs with her performances I can play. I guess you can burn vinyls onto CDs yourself.

Also amazing amount of different record players you can buy nowadays.