Why I Still Buy & Listen to CDs in 2026 — And Why It Has Nothing to Do With Nostalgia

I still buy CDs in 2026.

I know that sounds strange. Music has never been easier to access than it is today. For the price of a few coffees each month, Spotify gives you access to an incredible amount of music. You can listen to every album within seconds, create a playlist for any occasion and have something playing in the background for as long as you want.

So why would anyone still buy a CD?

It isn't because I think CDs sound better than everything else. Most of the time, I'm not able to tell a CD apart from a vinyl record or a digital version. It isn't because of nostalgia, and it certainly isn't because I believe everything was better before streaming existed.

It is because I like having something tangible.

That distinction has become increasingly important to me.

For most of my life, entertainment was something you could actually own. You bought a film and it came in a DVD case. You bought a video game, and it came in a case, with a booklet and artwork. You bought an album and you had the CD, the booklet, the artwork and the physical object sitting on a shelf. You bought a book and, once you paid for it, it was yours to keep forever. You had collections, physical ones.

Today, most of those things have disappeared into a screen.

My music collection can fit inside my phone. My films can be streamed without ever entering my house. Even books, which have survived the digital transition better than most forms of media, can now be carried around by the hundreds inside an e-reader.

It is incredibly convenient.

It is also strangely empty.

When I look at a Spotify library, I don't really see a collection. I see access. The distinction might seem insignificant, but it changes the relationship we have with the things we enjoy.

A physical collection takes up space. And space is limited, forcing you to choose. That is part of its value.

You can look at a shelf and remember where something came from, when you bought it, who introduced you to it or what period of your life you associate with it. You might have an album you haven't listened to for five years, but it is still there.

Digital collections don't really work that way. They can be enormous without becoming meaningful. Sometimes, you will reach the point of not knowing what you "own" in your digital library.

You can have ten thousand songs available to you and still feel like you have nothing to listen to.

This is one of the strange contradictions of streaming. We have access to more music than any previous generation could have imagined, but our actual choices are increasingly shaped by systems designed to choose for us.

Spotify knows what I have listened to. It knows what I skipped, what I replayed and what I added to playlists. It knows what people with similar listening habits are enjoying. From all of this information, it can make increasingly accurate suggestions about what I might want to hear next.

That is useful.

But it also means that music is no longer something I necessarily go looking for.

It comes looking for me. There's no joy of discovering. The feeling of going into a store and seeing what's on the shelves that might interest me. Talking to people and trading insights and opinions to discover something new.

The same thing happens everywhere else. Social media decides which photographs appear in front of us. Streaming services decide which films and series are recommended. Online shops decide which products we might want to buy. News feeds decide which stories deserve our attention.

The technology is incredibly good at removing the need to search.

And there is something liberating about searching for something yourself.

When you buy a CD, you have to make a decision. You have to find the album, look at it, decide that you actually want it and spend your money on it. You have committed to one particular piece of music instead of simply adding another song to an endless digital library.

You take it out of the case, look at the artwork and put the disc into the player. The album has a beginning and an end. It follows a story that was designed and meant to be experienced in order. You listen to the record you chose instead of waiting for a platform to decide what should come next.

There is no algorithm trying to keep you listening.

And perhaps that is the part I value most.

The physical object creates a small amount of friction between wanting something and consuming it. Today, we tend to see friction as a problem. Everything is supposed to be faster, easier and more immediate.

But not every kind of friction is bad. The same is true for coffee, as you can read here!

Sometimes having to make a choice makes the experience better.

The same is true of books. I like having books on a shelf, even though an e-reader is objectively more practical if I am travelling. A physical book reminds me that I read it. It becomes part of the room and, eventually, part of my life. It is part of the decoration. It's a collection of ideas put to paper. It becomes a collection of minds.

The same thing happens with a film on DVD or an album on CD, or even a physical copy of a video game.

It becomes an object rather than a temporary service.

That doesn't mean I have abandoned streaming. I use Spotify. I watch films online. I use digital tools every day. I have no interest in pretending that technology hasn't made many things better.

The problem is not digital media.

The problem is when digital access becomes the only relationship we have with culture.

Because when everything becomes access, nothing really feels like ours. Ida Auken said in 2016, "You'll own nothing and be happy". I'm not about that at all.

A subscription can disappear. A catalogue can change. An album can become unavailable. A film can move from one streaming service to another. An account can be cancelled. An algorithm can stop recommending something.

The things we thought we had collected were never really ours in the first place.

A CD is different.

It is not dependent on a recommendation feed. It doesn't need an internet connection. Nobody can decide that the album is no longer available in my country. It sits on my shelf until I decide otherwise.

More importantly, it represents a choice I made.

That is what collecting used to mean.

You didn't simply have access to everything. You had to decide what was worth keeping.

A music collection was therefore also a record of someone's taste. You could walk into a person's home and learn something about them by looking at their shelves. Their records, books and films told a story.

I think we have lost some of that.

Not because people have stopped having interests, but because so much of what we consume no longer leaves a physical trace.

You can spend ten years listening to music every day and have almost nothing to show for it.

Maybe that shouldn't matter. But I think it does.

There is something satisfying about seeing the things that have stayed with you.

My CDs are not valuable investments. They aren't particularly rare and I don't buy them because I expect them to become worth more money. I buy them because I want to own the music I care about, in a form that exists outside a subscription and outside a recommendation system.

And there is another reason.

When I choose a CD from the shelf, I already know what I want to listen to.

That sounds obvious, but it is increasingly unusual.

Most digital platforms are built around continuation. One song leads to another, one video leads to another, one recommendation leads to another. There is always something else waiting.

The physical album has a much simpler proposition.

Here it is.

Listen to this.

And then, when it finishes, you can decide what comes next.

Perhaps that is why I still buy CDs in 2026.

Not because I miss the past, but because I like the idea of owning a small, deliberate collection of things I have chosen for myself.

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