I think it is really nice for kids to get something physical they can look for themselves in stores and find music that they think looks interesting rather than just what the algorithm would give them were they to use screens (They watch some tv though). But they also seem to love just looking in the booklets and the pictures of the artists or they characters from the books. But it also gives them more freedom to just put on a record if they want rather than having to ask me to put something on our Google Nest.

Vinyl records are still too hard to put on and there isn't that much good kids stuff you can find and cassettes are so easy to accidentely tangle. They are still not that good at handling the cd records so they get smudged and jacks and stuff, but i'm looking into buying a CD-R writer so i can easily make new copies of the cd:s that stutter and won't play.

That shifted again in the mid-teens when I started noticing more bands selling cassette tapes, especially in the more underground scenes. Then it was back to vinyl when things got back in action post-COVID.

But what I've noticed over the last couple of years is everyone's selling CDs again. What's more, they're *actually focusing on CDs*. Over the last 20-30 years it's been more an assumption that one is going to download the music and sure, maybe buy some physical media at the merch table. Now it seems like the assumption is you're going to just buy the physical media.

I've found that interesting.

Ok, but the lack of a unit on vinyl makes it very hard to have an apples to apples comparison here. If cds are selling 1000 units and vinyl is selling 1,000,000 units, those 16% and 2.4% numbers are pretty wildly different things.

Also, the huge increase is primarily driven by KPOP (in particular, BTS). CD sales growth was like 6% without them.

I don't know that we can draw a conclusion from that 16% except BTS can move physical media.

Those CDrs were 20 years old and have been sitting in a hot, humid attic for the last 10+ years, but still recorded fine.

The real problem was almost no one had a CD player not even in their car!

Also, I don’t think k3b or any of the other software i tried has been updated since 2005, but it all still worked great!

Most importantly, one of my friends brought it home and his 8 year old was so intrigued by it she came over and we burned a bunch of mix cds for her and her friends! I have no idea if her friends had anyway to play them, but she enjoyed making hand made cover art for each friend.

When I was in the attic looking for blank cds I came across a few other spindles of burned cds. Both mixes from my formative years and a bunch my wife had kept. Those times were magical and I few like kids have missed out.

A few years back I saw some people buying collections of thousands of discs for maybe $100. Even if 10% of it was good, that was still a huge win. Those huge hauls are becoming rare now as they have been picked clean.

If only Minidisc had better audio quality, it would have REALLY been the perfect medium.

It started as an impulse purchase and then evolved into hunting down various electronic remixes from the 90s heyday that are not available (legally) in electronic form.

Then I started to notice more & more how my streaming services were revoking songs out of my playlists, which reminded me I don't own anything I can't hold with in my hands.

My final annoyance with the enshittification of streaming music is just the UI/UX of these apps now. I don't want the buttons to move, I don't want a notification, I don't want a popup. I want to press play and listen to music like a big boy. Despite our phones being 100x faster, it seems to take longer and longer to simply do that.

In some case I do buy MP3 directly from online stores, if not available as CD, and burn the CD as well.

Never had a Spotify account, nor plan to.

Vinyl, Casettes, and CDs may be the last physical audio media forever.

Turned out he really love it and I also bought more cassetee as requested from him, and the cost of those cassetee seem surpass the player itself

What I find the child seems feel more real if the music play from some gears instead of digital ones, and he know well how to use and find a track in the middle

I also want to buy a new cd player which is also I want when I was youth...

Maybe people are just tired of the streaming and I also find that there seems to be a surge of new album and music in youtube music now, the album's cover seems being generated by AI, and maybe also the music itself is generated by AI

As ridiculous as it sounds, but there is some intent in doing all of that and listening to the files on your hard drive. We have a vynil/CD player as well, but they are not at my workplace.

I was a teenager in a small provincial town in the Netherlands. It had two record stores. They were small. There was also the library with a small collection of decent cds that you could "borrow" (copy to tape). If it wasn't on the radio or in those stores, or in the library, I had no access to it. That was how I built my music collection. Buying albums properly was expensive. I only had about 10 or so. I had a few dozen tapes. Maybe 60 Albums or so and some mix tapes. That was it. Compared to what I have on Spotify, that's nothing.

There's all this BS. how everything was better on "hifi" equipment of the 1980s. The reality of course was that most poor teenagers did not have access to either decent equipment or decent music. I tracked down most of what I had in physical form on Spotify ages ago. And I even listen to some of it regularly. Sounds great with decent modern headphones. I'm perfectly happy with my Sennheiser bluetooth headphones. It probably sounds infinitely better than what I had back in the day. I alsp have a much wider selection of music. Anything I want really.

And of course I'm now in my fifties and my hearing isn't what it used to be in terms of high frequencies. I'm about average in hearing loss (i.e. not going deaf) but any absurdly priced headphones would probably be wasted on me. That's the irony of aging audiophiles, right when they can afford all the right gear, their hearing starts deteriorating. You can't compensate for that with gold plated plugs or any of the other nonsense people are into. Records and analog amplifiers sound nice mainly because of the sound distortion and compression. This isn't all that hard to emulate with digital processing. The pop music of the nineteen eighties was optimized for the cheap FM radios that most people had. That's why a lot of albums got remastered later. The original sound is not actually all that great on modern equipment.

Nowadays, I can buy a $3 microcontroller board and make it play mp3's. And it'll outlive most CDs that are pressed today, so what?

The internal forum.

https://rateyourmusic.com/artist/noise

However, I have watched Spotify destroy my playlists regularly, and now it seems to happen more than once a year! Songs that they still have a license for and still have on their platform will be removed from your playlist and marked "Unavailable" because some licensing agreement change meant the actual file and unique ID in their system has changed, and they make zero effort to resolve the damage this regularly does to my library and playlists.

It makes staying on the spotify platform, the spotify "ecosystem" as it were, utterly worthless. No playlist you make today can be expected to be usable in the future. Any effort you put in to organize and find stuff is for naught.

Meanwhile, my shitty folder full of mp3 rips from sketchy sources from highschool has stayed with me, and works perfectly.

It's getting hard to justify now. None of the money I pay even goes to the people I listen to, because they are primarily niche and indie groups. Spotify seems to be doing this on purpose, and a close friend of people high up in Spotify is running a business to generate AI music so that spotify can fill up their generated playlists with slop that they don't have to pay anyone for, and which dilutes the rev share for real humans.

It is a ceremony, a ritual, a physical engagement of respect for the artists that created the work.

You don't do that to discardable music, the kind of crap they play on shopping malls, gyms, supermarkets and elevators. You do it to what you recognize as art and worth attention and care.

I've personally been buying vinyl both because of the fact I missed out on the excitement myself growing up, and because I have some records that came out decades before I was born that play like the day they were minted. They've outlasted pretty much all of my CD's.

I don't buy into these crackles. I stopped using MP3. A high quality OPUS file format is the way to go for me. I can take the whole music library in my pocket to the places with no internet, listen through good enough in-ear headphones, or with a small speaker (if for more people), and charge that stuff with a small foldable solar panel on the go, next to the tent. Try this with your gramophone.

YMMV.