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Last night I saw the Drive-by Truckers in Atlanta. They’re about as solid a rock-and-roll band as still exists, with a Southern country influence that feels difficult to find in rock music in 2024. They’re the best, and I try to see them every time they’re in town.

I visited the merch booth at the end of the show to pick up a t-shirt for a friend, and I bought something for myself that I didn’t expect: a CD of the band’s excellent album “The Dirty South.” I can’t remember the last new CD I bought, but the format has been on my mind lately.

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For the better part of 20 years, I’ve had bins full of old CDs in my home office space. Hundreds of them, spanning the first CD I ever bought (R.E.M.’s “Eponymous,” a Christmas gift from my lifelong friend, Rob) to the last CD I ever bought, which was — perhaps ironically — R.E.M.s “Live at the Olympia.” I bought that one in probably 2009 or 2010, which means now that, up until last night, I’m going on 15 years without having bought a fresh CD.

So why did I just buy myself a CD player? We’ll get to that shortly.

Let’s take a momentary diversion into music streaming and the weird re-ascension of vinyl.

Ya-whomst?!

Before there was Spotify or Tidal (heh), there was Yahoo! Music Unlimited. YMU was a brief 2005 experiment into music download rentals, borne in the aftermath of Napster and LimeWire that allowed users to pay about $10 a month and download as much music as they want. It was all in a proprietary format, so you couldn’t keep the music, obviously, but you could pay one price and listen to everything. It was a little clunky and was Windows-only (as it used a Microsoft-specific digital rights management format), but it was pretty far ahead of its time.

I caught mad grief among my music-loving for using this service that cost $120 a year, but left you with nothing you could actually own once you quit the service. Sounds normal now but, in a period of normalized $.99 song downloads and cheap MP3 players, the subscription model felt pretty radical.

Next was the ill-fated Zune Pass which was, again, Windows-only, but a spectacular deal if you weren’t strictly an iPod user: $15 with unlimited rights-managed downloads AND 15 songs per month that you got to download and keep. Seemed too good to be true, and it was. Sadly, Zune was a bomb, and Zune Pass went with it.

Everything for nothing

Today we’re awash in subscription music services. Hell, I subscribe to three of them: Amazon Music Unlimited (because I stream a lot from Alexa devices when I’m airfrying chicken nuggets), YouTube Music (because it comes with YouTube Premium, which is a requirement in my family) and Apple Music (because it is bundled in some arcane way into my Verizon plan for reason known only to god and Tim Cook).

In truth, they’re all mostly fine. Hell, for what they cost, they’re borderline miraculous. When I was a broke high school student, I bought two or three CDs a month. That’s something on the order of $45 a month worth of music when I was making about $7 an hour. Roughing out the numbers, that’s basically a day’s work shift to buy three CDs worth of music, when what I usually wanted was a couple of songs.

Sure, there were ways around the cost, most of which were repeatedly subscribing to BMG and Columbia House to get piles of free CDs with an obligation to buy “only two more” over the coming years at exorbitant prices, and to occasionally have a Guns ‘N’ Roses or Whitney Houston CD forcibly mailed to your house will a bill laden with vig shipping, handling, packaging and usury charges. We’re talking like $30 for a mailed CD you never asked for, but you always had to amortize the outrageous cost over the initial box of CDs you’d been enjoying for the prior year.

Flash forward to now and virtually every album in print is available at a click for a fraction of the cost. Almost everything is available all the time, everywhere, for a few bucks a month. I can be in any room in my house and holler out a song title, or a lyric, or a concept of a song, and some machine learning model somewhere will do its level best to send me what I’m asking for.

Is it perfect? Absolutely not. Sometimes you get a live version of the song when you want the album version, and I have absolutely no clue how you ask it not to play that one. Songs that have weird titles — “W Tx. Teardrops” by Old 97s or “Hostile, Mass.” by The Hold Steady, for example — are borderline impossible to ask for because of incongruities between the speech synthesis parts of the chain, which understand that “Mass.” probably means “Massachusetts,” and the speech recognition parts of the chain, which do not. So Alexa, for example, will tell me that the song title is “Hostile, Massachusetts,” but if you ask her for that song title, she’ll assume you’re insane and want something entirely different.

First world problems? Absolutely. Anyway, I digress.

Point I’m making is that I used to spend a lot on music. And now I spend next to nothing, and the artists are getting almost nothing from that.

Vinyl because I am middle-aged

I’ll write more on the vinyl thing later, but the long and short of it is that I started buying vinyl again during the pandemic, like so many middle-aged guys I know. I have a small collection of records still in my possession from when I was a kid, and I thought it would be a fun experience to listen to them again while we were all stuck indoors for two years. I bought a completely okay Sony turntable and then proceeded to drop many hundreds of pandemic dollars into mostly-used, and dramatically overpriced, vinyl records that have really brought me a lot of joy. Most of my childhood records sound poppy and dreadful because I rarely returned them to their sleeves, but that’s also part of the charm of vinyl, I guess. It’s kind of like the charm of having a rock in your shoe: this feels so real and viscerally physical, when the truth is, it kinda sucks.

Isn’t there a CD player in this story?

Yes, yes, pipe down.

So to bring this all together, a couple of weeks ago I wanted to listen to a song from Bob Mould’s “Last Dog and Pony Show” album (“Moving Trucks,” it’s a banger). It’s not on Apple Music. Neither is his “hubcap” eponymous album.

It gets worse. You like Wall of Voodoo? I hope you like “Mexican Radio” because most of the Prieboy-era stuff is nowhere to be found. I have “Seven days in Sammystown” in vinyl, and, of course, the greatest live album of all time, “Ugly Americans (in Australia)” but if you want to stream them, you’re likely out of luck.

Bettie Serveert? There’s some, but not everything. There’s an album I couldn’t find — the “Venus in Furs” live cover album — one week, then found the next.

It was then that I realized that, literally underneath my turntable are bins of CDs. Hundreds of them, collected from the decades of BMG, from Columbia House, from Tape World and Record Bar, from Best Buy and Camelot Music. I had, honestly, thought that I would give these to Goodwill eventually but all of a sudden they felt like treasure. All of the out-of-print Bob Mould and live REM and Wall of Voodoo I could ever want, their digital bits perfectly ensconced in eternal plastic. I just needed a way to play them.

Buying a CD player isn’t what it used to be. Most of the great, old brands barely exist anymore, and most of what’s out there looks like absolute dogcrap. Word is that the Goodwills can be a good place to find them, but I didn’t really want a full component system, just a player that could output to raw digital. I have a little THX-compliant amp that has what I assumed to be a digital-to-audio converter that was going to work better than any of the cheapo disc players I saw on Amazon, but I struggled to find exactly what I was looking for.

Until I looked for a DVD player and struck paydirt.

Nirvana for playing old Nirvana

My amp has a digital coaxial input, so literally all I wanted was a quiet, small disc reader that would spit out an accurate stream of bits to it. I found that in a small DVD player, of all things, which checked every box, including the aforementioned coaxial output. It reads the bits, it sends the bits and that’s all I want of it.

The past month has been a blast. I’ve made a habit of reaching into the bin of unsorted old CDs and just putting on whatever I pull out. Fleetwood Mac’s Greatest Hits? Awesome. Michael Penn’s “Resigned”? Fantastic. Meat Loaf’s “Bat Out of Hell 2”? Yeah, I guess, why not.

It feels like all of the investment I made in music in my teens and twenties has come back in spades. The music sounds great, as great as it ever did. I have booklets and cover art and strange cardboard form factors for some of the cases. Sure, the goddamned tabs are broken off of at least half of my CD cases, but that’s just the charm of the format.

Will CD prices shoot up like vinyl’s did? Maybe, but it’s doubtful, as for most folks they’re essentially worthless so they have a long way to go up. Or maybe I’m just getting out ahead of the next pandemic, which should be coming right about now.