During long car rides, I like to have a bit of background music playing on the stereo. The type of music doesn’t really matter — I typically rotate through one of my many Spotify playlists. On a recent trip from Ann Arbor to my hometown in western Michigan, I found my phone battery dropping rapidly until the on-screen pop-up warned me I had only 5% before my phone died. With no phone charger in sight, I begrudgingly turned off the music to conserve battery. It took a few seconds of silence, drumming my fingers on the steering wheel, watching orange cones whiz by in the side mirrors and planning my evening until I remembered I had another way to listen to music in this car: the CD player.
I was driving my parents’ old 2007 Honda Odyssey, a car older than my brother but younger than me. Unlike newer car models with CarPlay and fancy aux cords, this one still has a CD player built into it. As I pressed the buttons to start up the player, I found my options to be limited. The only CDs loaded into the machine were Wicked (Original Broadway Cast Recording) and Hamilton (Original Broadway Cast Recording). I realize this to be an anomaly in itself; we really are a theater family. But as I re-taught myself how to use the CD player, I started thinking about ownership and music. Why did it feel so different when I only had two album options instead of the 200+ songs and albums that I have downloaded on Spotify? Did I really “own” any of that music?
When I was younger, I didn’t spend much time listening to music. I got a Spotify account at the start of the pandemic, but before then, my music taste was limited to the Honda CD player, what the radio hosts played on Star 105.7 and my iPod. When I was nine years old, my mother took her old iPhone 4 and downloaded albums onto it. This device was my introduction to having a music taste, where I listened to an assortment of songs from ABBA’s Take a Chance on Me to Brandi Carlile’s “Keep Your Heart Young.” This was the first time I got to listen to music on a device that was obsolete, save for its iTunes library.
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In the digital age, subscription services grant us nearly unlimited access to an abundance of music. My freshman year, I took classical voice lessons and was working on Sure On This Shining Night. Instead of having to find this obscure opera on CD, I simply keyed it into the search bar and found variations of it by several vocalists. I don’t have a record player with colorful vinyls from Underground Sounds. I’m not one to scour thrift stores for old CDs. When Taylor Swift announced her new album The Life of a Showgirl, I felt no need to preorder a copy despite the fact that I know I will listen to it eventually. The accessibility of streaming services makes listening to music incredibly convenient. One can simply pay a monthly fee rather than build a music collection from scratch. Want to listen to an artist’s entire discography? Check. Trying to queue up the perfect song for when you pick your date up? Check. Looking for an electric soundtrack to back your workout? Check. The possibilities are seemingly endless.
For me and many busy college students, the physical media from our childhood isn’t always the most practical. My freshman year of college, I made monthly Spotify playlists that reflected the way I felt and what type of music I enjoyed at the time. I pretty much always had my headphones on, whether I was walking from my dorm to the library or gazing out the window on the bus up to North Campus. It felt refreshing to move to a new place and have new music to reflect that.
Yet, at the same time, this infinite abyss of music — playlist after playlist often algorithmically curated — caused many songs to lose their meaning. It seems that when everything is available, nothing is special. In the days of iTunes, we had to decide whether to purchase individual songs or buy the whole album. Everything was a calculated decision.
Despite the fact that CDs, vinyls or VHS tapes may lack practicality, my rediscovery of physical media through the CD player in my Honda sent me into a fascination with the medium. And I’m not alone. Recent trends show that perhaps Generation Z is turning away from the digital and back toward the analog. In the first half of 2024, physical album sales increased 3.2%, which indicates that my recent fascination with physical media may be part of a larger cultural shift. In an era where everything is changing, we cling to what we can — and in this case, it is holding physical media in our hands.
With subscription services, we face the danger of having the music we love and listen to regularly taken away. In 2022, folk singer Joni Mitchell removed her music from Spotify in the midst of the pandemic and Spotify’s partnering with Joe Rogan’s podcast. Though some fans supported her cause and stood with her, others expressed outrage at both her political stance and the removal. When one owns physical copies of music, issues like these don’t arise because things can’t disappear out of your grasp completely.
Subscription services are complicated for other reasons as well. Recently, several individuals have begun boycotting Spotify after CEO Daniel Ek invested approximately $700 million toward a defense startup. I understand that, under capitalism, having to “buy” music in the first place feels antithetical to art’s purpose. I believe we all should be able to listen to music and have tracks we feel certain bonds with but, under this system, that’s not the case.
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The debate around physical media is one that I love to bring up when chatting with friends. To me, it’s a more involved and tactile experience to browse through records, to feel the cardboard sleeves between your fingers. I’ve also had friends point out the inherent friction that is involved in interacting with physical media, of hand-selecting pieces. If you’re listening to music while you have some friends over in your apartment, you have to walk from the couch to where the records are stored. You then slide the record out of the sleeve to place it carefully on top of the record player, where you must listen with no easy skips.
Part of this intentionality with music became relevant to me after I attended the University of Michigan’s New England Literature Program earlier this summer. Since the program was completely technology-free, the only music we had to listen to was the live music we produced: someone messing around on the piano before dinner, the evening strum of a guitar around the campfire. My peers and I wrote down song lyrics and we kept lists of what we would listen to when we left the program and got our phones back — and with them, our music libraries. There was a big debate on the van I was driving home in about what our first song would be once we piled into the Chrysler Pacifica and drove out of Acadia National Park. There was extreme intentionality in the choice to listen to “America” by Simon & Garfunkel. Now, whenever I hear the song, I’m reminded of my physical connection to it.
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Recently, I was on vacation with my family in the U.S. Virgin Islands. While we wandered through one of the local markets, we stopped to talk to a musician who was playing the steel drum. He gave us a spectacular interactive performance, playing songs the crowd requested and serenading my sister for her birthday; he even taught us about the history of the steel drum. But what struck me the most about this interaction was not the musician’s jubilant performance of “Careless Whisper” but rather his folding table of personal CDs that he was selling for $5 a piece, each kept in a little paper sleeve. I remember being somewhat surprised — “They still make CDs?” I thought — and impressed by the collection’s variety. He had CDs in genres ranging from classical music to reggae and even a Christmas album. I couldn’t help but wonder how many he sold daily or how many tourists bought them and flew them back to their respective countries only to never open and use them. My father, browsing the selection, delicately picked up the CDs, turning them over to see the tracklist on the back. He settled on two CDs and purchased them. At the time, I remember cynically wondering to myself if we would ever even play them. Did my mother still have the old CD player that we used to listen to Disney soundtracks on while we cleaned our rooms? Would I remember to slide it into the Honda Odyssey’s CD player?
Amid the doubt surrounding my father’s purchase, there was one small thought keeping me at bay. If the internet crashes tomorrow or my Spotify goes haywire, I know that I have a unique record from a Caribbean guy who just wants to make music. So, I’m adding “find a CD player at Salvation Army” onto my to-do list for the week.
Statement Contributor Megan Ahrens can be reached at mgahrens@umich.edu.
The post An ode to my CD player: Physical music in a digital world appeared first on The Michigan Daily.
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