Turns Out, I’m A CD Collector

A couple of years ago, I bought a turntable and rediscovered a love of music. The vinyl medium made me sit and listen to an entire record, in a way I hadn’t done since I was in high school. This was the reason, along with realizing how much money I’d spent on things I don’t own, I ended a nearly 10 year streak of using almost exclusively streaming music.

There was another side effect of starting a record collection though. As I started spending more time in record stores, I started flipping through the CDs as well as the records. I’d get super excited when a record came with a CD instead of a download card. I started noticing how cheap CDs were, and that I could often get them for a fraction of the price of an MP3 download. I started digging through clearance sections at my local record store, Goodwill, and Half Price Books. I began ordering CDs from sellers on Discogs so I wouldn’t have to stress as much about what would happen to the item in shipping. And before I knew it, I was spending more money on CDs than records and had amassed a decent CD collection.

Don’t get me wrong, I still do love buying records. But my buying habits for them tend to be “I really like this band, and want this thing from them.” Where when it comes to CDs it’s more of “Let’s go see if I can find anything that looks interesting!” And when I want to sit and just listen to something, it’s mostly vinyl. Something about the ritual of putting the record on the turntable, and cuing up the stylus just helps me get into the right headspace to really listen. But for the most part, you’ll find me digging through piles of jewel cases, looking for my next favorite thing.