Get the latest gossip

CDs sales are growing. How I wish I hadn’t given my beloved collection away

Compact discs provided the soundtrack to his life. Then came streaming and he couldn’t get rid of them fast enough. As CDs enjoy a renaissance, our writer looks back at what he lost

It was probably because I was a Piler, never a Racker or an Archivist, that I found it so easy to leave CDs behind The last type of collection was the Archive, a shrine-like version of the Cabinet that was kept pristine, in A-to-Z order, perhaps with additional separation of albums and singles by genre, rarity, region of release. I miss the fussy, fusty process of deciding to put one on, a rummaging hand, a scour for the correct disc... By this point we were both listening to music through a subscription streaming service – Spotify at first, then Apple’s equivalent. As I look at this graphic on my iPhone, propped on the desk beside me, it looks as if the band are repeatedly fading into the depths of the device, there to join the pixels, the compressed data, the algorithms, the nudging search results – innovations that enrich as well as complicate today’s curation and consumption of music.

Get the Android app