Why I started collecting CDs

I had a good deal going when it came to music. My family account was shared with 5 other friends and the subscription cost only came down to an average of 420 baht (~105 HKD) a year. Baht because the price is cheaper in Thailand than it is in Hong Kong. As the account manager, every year I would collect the annual payment from my friends like a loan shark and diligently paid the monthly bills. The arrangement ran like clockwork. This went on for 5 years. Everyone was happy. During which time I saw the price slowly crept up from 206 baht a month in 2021 to today costing 249 in 2026 (20.8% increase!). Who doesn’t love a bit of inflation? I am talking, ofcourse, about Spotify. But this year I decided to stop my music subscription and opt for physical media for the following reasons.

Subscriptions and enshittification

“You’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy” - Ida Auken, Danish Politician

You may have already heard of that quote. Written and published in an World Economic Forum essay in 2016, the author predicts a hypothetical future in 2030 where people need to rely on a shared economy to survive ¹. The current consumer trend these days where a subscription model is being used in more and more things frustrates me. Big corporations are screwing over us consumers through a playbook called ’enshittification’. I’m not sure where the word first started entering our vocabulary, but the problem has gotten so bad that the Norwegian government is trying bring awareness to it ². If you haven’t heard of this word and have 4 minutes time, please do yourself a favor and watch the video. It is quite entertaining but also infuriating. The playbook basically goes like this:

1. Make a great product, provide a great service to draw in customers
2. Capture as much marketshare as possible to the point of being almost like a monopoly
3. Lock user/customers in.
4. Maximise value extraction at the expense of the customer and product quality.

At the beginning of this lifecycle, corporations are willing to take massive losses and offer incredible value to the user so that users will grow reliant on it. Uber started off providing convenient ride hailing services for users at a great price, sometimes even cheaper than hailing a taxi. Phones run smooth like butter when they are newly released. Amazon promised fast delivery and cheaper prices to the same products compared to buying from the store. Competing services like Grab and FoodPanda try to undercut each other by offering greater and greater discounts to customers until one of the competition drops off. Eventually, when companies achieve a significant marketshare and consumers are locked in, the enshittification begins. The services slowly start to cost more than what it replaced. An innocent looking software update gets pushed causing your phone to get a tad bit slower, a bit buggier we are compelled to get a new one (I’m looking at you my Xiaomi phone). Corporations will do anything they can to maximise profits at the expense of the consumers. There are endless examples of this that is well documented on Consumer Rights Wiki. Lately Spotify is pushing more AI generated music to their users. This affects artists who earn money from the number of listens and users who get served slop. Owning physical media is just a small way I am taking back control and reducing my dependence on these corporations. Honestly, buying CDs has already costed me more than a couple years worth of Spotify subscriptions. And I’m totally fine with it. I’m tired of everything being subscription based.

Ownership

Music streaming services are convenient. It doesn’t cost too much. Your music library can be sync effortlessly across your devices. But at the end of the day, you don’t own that copy of music. You’ll need an internet connection to listen to that music. If Spotify or whatever streaming service disappears someday, so will your music library. If they decided to increase the price (as they already do every year), most will choose to pay it because they have the music library you’ve built up over the years under their control. Most wouldn’t want to go through the hassle of rebuilding their playlists again. Owning the files to my own music library (or any other physical media) is about control. When you own the music, it doesn’t matter if Spotify jacks up their price or if I lose access to my account. My music is here locally and I can do whatever I want with it.

Escapism

Last September I came across a quote while watching Adam Savage on YouTube. The video was about this guy who started a company that sells these extremely expensive mechanical keyboards. To paraphrase it here, it alludes that people are drawn to escapist things because they are unsatisfied with their current reality. In some ways, starting a physical media collection signifies my disappointment with how some things are in the present. By listening to music via a CD or through a DAP, I am able to connect with a past era where life felt a bit more optimistic and technology seemed more fun. Even if it’s just for a bit.

Conclusion

Enough with the rambling. The reasons I’ve outlined may seem kinda gloomy but there are also some fun reasons I’m doing this. CDs usually come with a small booklet within the cover. These booklets usually contain artist’s album artwork and/or song lyrics. And I think that it’s cool. The way I listen to music has also changed since starting my collection. I listen to an album from start to finish more as opposed to the curated playlists I had on Spotify. Is it a better way to listen? I’m still on the fence about that and there probably isn’t a right or wrong answer here but it has allowed me to be more intentional about what I’m listening to. Normally I vibe with only a handful of songs within an album but listening to entire albums in one go is a new and refreshing experience. Music discovery has also changed drastically. Spotify and YouTube Music algorithms are great at suggesting songs that it thinks you will like. I’m discovering more music through research, recommendations, or by pure chance. On my recent trip to Tokyo, I discovered Tower Records, a music retail store, and I was blown away. It is a large multi-story building overflowing with CDs and vinyls with listening stations where we can freely sample the available music. I’ve discovered some cool music that way. I wish Hong Kong had something like that. Rummaging through crates of CDs at the flea market in Sham Shui Po or perusing the discount section of CD stores in old dying malls has also been a fun new weekend activity of mine to discover new music. It’s a fun hobby.

My goal with this new blog series is to be more mindful about the music I’m listening to and to help me keep track of the albums I’ve accumulated so far. Any music recommendations or thoughts very much welcomed!