With more than 800 million people subscribing to a music streaming service, wireless speakers have become a familiar sight in homes. But expect to get reacquainted with a different object to play music soon: the CD player, once consigned to obsolescence, is back.
John Lewis report that searches for CD players are up 96% since July, possibly owing to students heading to university and buying the systems for their rooms. The £79 Crosley Voyager, and the £129 Pure Classic C-D6 are both sold out online, with the Voyager scheduled to return in October. Portable CD players are also popular.
This tallies, of course, with sales of CDs themselves. A report this year found that the growth of CD sales is up 16%, compared with vinyl’s 2.4%. HMV reports that sales of CDs are up 10% year on year – thanks to artists often providing unique 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 the managing director, Phil Halliday. “But it goes much wider than that. We’re seeing very strong CD demand around artists like Olivia Rodrigo, Ariana Grande and Olivia Dean.”
The fact that a vinyl record is about £35, compared with £12 for a CD, is no doubt a factor.
Tom Morgan-Freelander, the deputy editor of the technology magazine Stuff, has noticed the change over the past two years. He puts it down to consumers wanting to move away from using their phone, a better audio quality, and limited disposable income. “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.
In the CD aisle of an HMV in London on a weekday morning, people in their teens and twenties are browsing. Fourteen-year-old Milo Georgeaux-Healy has chosen two Dua Lipa albums as well as Brat by Charli xcx to play on 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, is visiting from Riyadh. He has selected a Madonna greatest hits, a Kacey Musgraves album and Private Dancer by Tina Turner. “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.”
Richard Farnell runs Vinyl Exchange in Manchester, where they also sell CDs. He says the people buying CDs are now younger, and cost is a big part of this. “The record labels started to up the price of vinyl and it became largely unaffordable for this demographic,” he says. “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.”
The CD revival is part of a wider fashion for retro tech. As well as the vinyl resurgence and cassettes becoming popular items to buy, there’s the vogue for wearing wired earphones over AirPods. “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,” confirms Katrina Mills, the category buying lead for audio and imaging at John Lewis.
Part of this is about optics. “Someone walking around with a portable CD player and wired headphones is signalling their sense of taste and cultural capital,” says brand strategist Alexi Gunner. He has labelled this trend “performative audiophilia”.
Gunner argues that the return to the physical for music is a kind of rebellion. “The status quo is streaming platforms and wireless audio on identical iPhones,” he says. “All this has taken away the haptic, sensorial quality of listening to music.”
J’Nae Phillips, who writes about Gen Z trends on her Substack Fashion Tingz, agrees. “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,” she says, and echoes Gunner’s point: “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.”
Arguably, the CD is the final revival available to young people – it’s the last format for music before the MP3 arrived in the early 2000s. However, Gunner suggests there may be a different object waiting in the wings: the USB stick. Fred Again named his 2025 tour after the portable drive. “It’s the most common format that a DJ will carry their music to a gig on,” explains Gunner. “In the frame of performative audiophilia, you’re showing that you’re not just listening to music, you are possibly a DJ, you are a tastemaker … it’s something that will become more popular.”
