‘It brings me joy’: how young people are making CDs cool again

The Compact Disc Finds a Second Audience in Gen Z Living Rooms

Wanderstayfinder.com – Walk into any HMV store in central London on a weekday morning and the sight in the CD aisle has shifted noticeably. Where once middle-aged collectors dominated the shelves, the browsers now skew sharply younger — teenagers and people in their twenties flipping through jewel cases, comparing track listings, and dropping albums into baskets. The format that spent the 2010s gathering dust in attic boxes is experiencing a quiet but measurable renaissance, driven by a generation that grew up with streaming and is now actively opting out of it.

The Numbers Behind the Nostalgia

The commercial data confirms what shoppers are doing. John Lewis, the British department store chain, logged a 96% jump in searches for CD players beginning in July, a spike the retailer attributes in part to students furnishing university bedrooms before the autumn term. Two compact all-in-one units — the £79 Crosley Voyager and the £129 Pure Classic C-D6 — sold out their online inventories, with the Voyager slated to restock in October. Portable CD players, the kind that once defined a decade of walkman culture, are seeing parallel demand.

Disc sales themselves are outpacing every other physical format. A report published earlier this year placed CD sales growth at 16%, against just 2.4% for vinyl. HMV’s own figures show a 10% year-on-year increase in CD revenue, which the chain credits partly to artists releasing exclusive content on the format.

“K-pop has been a massive driver, with BTS the most obvious example of artists that have led the resurgence,” says Phil Halliday, HMV’s managing director. “But it goes much wider than that. We’re seeing very strong CD demand around artists like Olivia Rodrigo, Ariana Grande and Olivia Dean.”

Price as the Quiet Catalyst

One factor that cannot be ignored is simple economics. A standard vinyl LP now retails around £35, while a CD typically costs £12. For a student on a tight budget, that gap compounds across a growing collection. Richard Farnell, who runs Vinyl Exchange in Manchester — a shop that stocks both formats — notes that the demographic buying discs has aged down considerably.

“The record labels started to up the price of vinyl and it became largely unaffordable for this demographic,” Farnell explains. “A copy of Oasis’s Definitely Maybe on original UK ‘Damont’ pressing can sell for between £150 and £250, depending upon condition. The standard vinyl reissue will be around £25-£30, but in our shop the CD version will only be £4.”

That £4 price point for a well-known album is difficult to replicate in any other physical medium, and it gives young collectors a low-risk entry into building a shelf of music they physically own.

Stepping Away from the Phone

Tom Morgan-Freelander, deputy editor of the technology magazine Stuff, has tracked the shift over roughly two years. He identifies three converging motivations: a desire to put the smartphone down, a preference for the fuller sound a dedicated optical drive delivers, and limited disposable income that rules out a full turntable-and-speaker setup.

“It’s: ‘I don’t want to spend money on a turntable and the speakers that go with it. I want to spend £150 on an all-in-one system that comes with the CD player,'” he says.

The all-in-one CD player — a single box with built-in speakers, a disc tray, and a small FM radio — thus occupies a sweet spot: cheaper than a hi-fi stack, more tactile than a phone, and compact enough for a dormitory desk.

Voices from the Aisle

Fourteen-year-old Milo Georgeaux-Healy, browsing an HMV in London, had selected two Dua Lipa albums alongside Charli xcx’s Brat, intending to play them on what she calls an “old boombox.”

“I like them because they’re cheaper,” she says. “They’re a lot more compact [than vinyl], and I find that they have better quality than your phone.”

Adel Alsehi, 27, visiting from Riyadh, had picked up a Madonna greatest-hits compilation, a Kacey Musgraves record, and Tina Turner’s Private Dancer. For him the appeal is less about price and more about ritual.

“It gives me a different feeling,” he says of CDs. “I feel like I’m listening to an artist’s work. It brings me joy.”

Performative Audiophilia and the Broader Retro Wave

The CD’s return does not exist in isolation. It sits alongside the vinyl resurgence, the resurgence of cassette tapes as collectible objects, and a visible preference among younger listeners for wired earphones over AirPods. Katrina Mills, category buying lead for audio and imaging at John Lewis, frames the phenomenon as a continuation of the analogue appetite that vinyl first reawakened.

“The vinyl revival re-established our appetite for analogue, and now we’re seeing that broader love for physical music drive a genuine surge in CD players,” Mills confirms.

Brand strategist Alexi Gunner coins the phrase “performative audiophilia” to describe the social signalling embedded in the choice. A young person walking through a city with a portable CD player and a pair of wired headphones is, in his reading, broadcasting taste and cultural capital in real time.

“The status quo is streaming platforms and wireless audio on identical iPhones,” Gunner argues. “All this has taken away the haptic, sensorial quality of listening to music.”

J’Nae Phillips, who writes about Gen Z cultural trends on her Substack Fashion Tingz, echoes the point from a slightly different angle. She sees the friction of choosing a disc, inserting it, and committing to a full side as a deliberate counterweight to algorithmic infinity.

“When music is effectively infinite and frictionless, something is appealing about having to choose an album, put a disc in and listen to it from beginning to end,” Phillips says. “There’s a certain cultural cachet in showing that you’re interested in music as an object and an experience, rather than simply consuming whatever happens to be recommended by an algorithm.”

The Last Format Before the Digital Flood

In the broader timeline of recorded sound, the compact disc occupies a peculiar position. It arrived in 1982, dominated the market for roughly two decades, and was then displaced by MP3 files and streaming services. For a generation born after 2000, the CD is not nostalgia in the way vinyl is for their parents; it is the final analogue-adjacent format before music became purely digital. Its current popularity among young buyers suggests that the boundary between “physical” and “digital” listening is being renegotiated, one disc at a time, in dorm rooms and bedroom shelves across the UK and beyond.