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 mini-renaissance, our writer looks back at what he lost and, below, musicians share their memories

Grease: The Original Soundtrack from the Motion Picture. The Beatles’ Red Album. A flimsy single, Boom! Shake the Room, by DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, and a chunky double-decker compilation record, Now That’s What I Call Music! 24. I thought about these treasured objects – my first CDs, bought or gifted to me in the mid-1990s – when I read the other day that CD sales were enjoying an unexpected bounce in the mid-2020s. I felt pleased at the news of a resurgence, if distantly so, as you might on hearing something nice about an old friend you long ago lost touch with. So fans of Taylor Swift are gobbling up special-edition copies of her albums on CD? Overall sales of the format are higher than they’ve been in decades? Great! Good for good old CDs.

It made me think of being 10 years old, newly in possession of a plasticky portable stereo that had (I still remember the glamour of the phrase) a disc reader under its press-open lid. With CDs in a CD player, you could boom and shake your room on infinite repeat without stopping to rewind. You could digitally programme the Red Album to skip And I Love Her, that buzz kill, and reorder the soundtrack of Grease to prioritise Beauty School Dropout, as heaven surely intended. You could randomise the order of a Now compilation, putting yourself through a daring Russian roulette: Ugly Kid Joe (the sonic equivalent of an empty pistol chamber), then PM Dawn (another empty chamber), then Bryan Ferry (bullet through the head).