For years, CDs were treated as little more than relics of a bygone era, gathering dust in charity shop bargain bins or languishing in forgotten glove boxes.
The meteoric rise of infinite streaming libraries seemed to spell the end for physical shiny discs, leaving them stuck in an awkward middle ground: neither as ultra-convenient as a smartphone app nor as romantically vintage as a heavy vinyl record.
Now, in an unexpected turn of events, the format is staging a genuine comeback, spearheaded by a generation that grew up entirely in the digital streaming age. Gen Z is snapping up portable players, hunting through secondhand music shops, and proudly displaying jewel cases on their bedroom shelves. Here’s why young people are suddenly ditching digital playlists in favour of silver discs, and how the humble CD managed to find its cool factor all over again.
CD player sales are climbing fast.
According to John Lewis, searches for CD players have risen by 96% since July, a jump possibly linked to students heading off to university and picking up systems for their new rooms. Two of the retailer’s most popular models, the £79 Crosley Voyager and the £129 Pure Classic C-D6, have both sold out online, with the Voyager not expected back in stock until October. Portable CD players in particular have proven especially popular.
CD sales themselves are on the rise too.
This surge in players lines up neatly with actual CD sales too. One recent report found CD sales have grown by 16%, comfortably outpacing vinyl’s more modest 2.4% rise. HMV has reported a similar trend, with CD sales up 10% year-on-year, something the retailer credits partly to artists offering unique content exclusively on the format.
K-pop in particular has played a major role in this shift, with acts like BTS often cited as leading the resurgence. But the trend stretches well beyond K-pop too, with strong CD demand also building around artists including Olivia Rodrigo, Ariana Grande and Olivia Dean.
Price is a major part of the appeal.
Cost is clearly playing a significant role in the CD’s comeback. A typical vinyl record now costs around £35, compared to roughly £12 for a CD, making the format a considerably more affordable way to own physical music.
According to the deputy editor of technology magazine Stuff, this change has become noticeable over the past couple of years, driven by a mix of wanting to move away from constantly using a phone, better audio quality, and simply having less disposable income to spend. Rather than investing in a turntable and a separate set of speakers, many people are instead opting for an affordable all-in-one system that includes a CD player built in.
Young shoppers are genuinely excited about the format.
At an HMV store in London on a weekday morning, teenagers and twentysomethings can regularly be found browsing the CD aisles. One 14-year-old shopper picked up two Dua Lipa albums alongside Charli XCX’s Brat, planning to play them on an old boombox. She says she likes CDs because they’re cheaper and more compact than vinyl, and in her experience, sound noticeably better than listening through her phone.
Another shopper, a 27-year-old visiting from Riyadh, picked out a Madonna greatest hits collection, a Kacey Musgraves album, and Tina Turner’s Private Dancer. He described CDs as giving him a different feeling entirely, saying it makes him feel like he’s genuinely listening to an artist’s work, calling the experience something that brings him real joy.
Secondhand CD shops are seeing a younger customer base too.
The owner of a record and CD shop in Manchester has noticed the same shift among his own customers, with buyers skewing noticeably younger these days, largely driven by cost. He explains that as record labels pushed vinyl prices up, the format became increasingly unaffordable for younger music fans. A rare original pressing of a classic album can sell for well over £100 depending on condition, while even a standard vinyl reissue typically costs £25 to £30. A CD version of the same album, by comparison, might only cost a few pounds in his shop.
It’s part of a much wider return to retro tech.
The CD comeback fits into a much broader trend toward retro technology more generally. Alongside the ongoing vinyl resurgence and a growing appetite for cassette tapes, wired earphones have also become fashionable again over wireless alternatives like AirPods.
According to John Lewis’s category buying lead for audio and imaging, the original vinyl revival helped re-establish a wider appetite for analogue formats, and that same broader love of physical music is now driving a genuine surge in CD player sales specifically.
There’s a social element to the trend too.
Part of the appeal also comes down to how it looks. According to one brand strategist, someone walking around with a portable CD player and wired headphones is effectively signalling their taste and cultural awareness to those around them, a trend he’s dubbed “performative audiophilia”.
He argues this return to physical formats represents a kind of quiet rebellion against the current status quo of streaming platforms and wireless audio on identical looking phones, which he suggests has stripped away much of the tactile, sensory experience of actually listening to music.
Choosing an album feels different to letting an algorithm decide.
A writer who covers Gen Z trends on her Substack echoes this sentiment, arguing that when music feels essentially infinite and entirely frictionless through streaming, there’s something genuinely appealing about having to choose a specific album, physically put a disc in, and listen to it from start to finish.
She points to a similar kind of cultural cachet in actively showing an interest in music as a physical object and an experience, rather than simply consuming whatever an algorithm happens to recommend next.
What might come after CDs.
In many ways, the CD represents the last realistic physical format still available for younger listeners to revive, since it was the final major format before MP3s took over in the early 2000s. That said, the same brand strategist suggests there may be another unlikely object waiting in the wings: the USB stick.
Musician Fred Again even named his 2025 tour after the portable drive, and it remains the most common format DJs use to carry their music to gigs. Within the same “performative audiophilia” framing, carrying a USB stick signals something slightly different again, suggesting not just that you listen to music, but that you might be a DJ or a tastemaker yourself, a trend the strategist expects to grow in popularity over time.
