As I walked into town recently I saw a sign in the window of our local HMV branch to say the store would be closing… for a refurb. Before I read the latter half of the notice, my mind jumped to the conclusion it was going for good.
“It was only a matter of time” I thought (or felt) in the microsecond of my mistake. The branch has survived the company going into administration at least twice in the past 20 years. It even opened with somewhat of a death knell in 2000, just as MP3s and illegal downloads began to render HMV’s core product somewhat useless.
I wasn’t there the day it opened, but my friend Jim was. He got me an autograph of the two celebrity guests, former Eastenders stars Joe Absolom and Leila Birch – who, fair play to them both, have had careers that’ve lasted longer than we might have expected they would also (yes, I still have those autographs somewhere).
Five years later, I was using HMV as a case study for my college coursework. I’d tried and failed at applying for a job in the local branch and possibly took some smug satisfaction in coming up with rebrand strategies for how the chain could now survive a radically different landscape, as if I could’ve saved their fortunes. Physical media sales were declining.
The vinyl revival felt like an anomaly, based on a superior product or pure nostalgia depending on who you ask (my own thoughts can be found here). Either way, HMV stores now carry substantially more vinyl records than the token selection they had in the early 2000s when I bought my first 7″ single (The Darkness – Growing On Me).
More recently it’s the CDs (and DVDs, Blu-Rays, etc..) that have played second fiddle to their larger predeccesors on the shop floor. The same has been true in our house also.
It’s an understatement to say I have a lot of things I collect. I also like to put these things on display. When the pandemic hit and we began spending a lot more time at home, there came a need to reclaim some space in the house and I was faced with the dilemma of deciding which shelving unit would need to give way and therefore, which collection would need to be boxed up.
It actually ended up being not too difficult a decision, but a symbolic one nonetheless. The CD and DVD cabinet would go.
A few hundred albums and films / box sets, purchased over the space of twenty years. From a humble beginning when I could probably carry the lot in one hand to the merging with my partner Sam’s own collection when we began living together in 2014.
There was just as much sentimental value held here as there is to be found anywhere else in our house, if not more so. So why was it so easy to let go?
It had been a long time coming.
On Thursday 2nd January 2014 I joined Netflix. I was probably a little late to the party. I’d tried streaming content before this and always felt taken out of the viewing experience by the occasional freeze to buffer, or frame rate and resolution issues as a result of dips in bandwidth.
I preferred the LoveFilm DVD rental through the post model. Streaming was something I did on my laptop, it was less of an event than sitting down to watching a film or working through a box set. A reluctant fall back option for catching up on something I’d missed on TV and forgotten to record.
I joined Netflix because they’d added a complete series I hadn’t seen since I was young, which I wasn’t overly fussed about owning (this would probably be a one time rewatch thing). It also wasn’t the easiest series to find a physical copy of and the price reflected that. £5.99 a month for Netflix, with my first month free began to seem like an attractive proposition.
It didn’t take long for me to apply this same mindset to other content once I’d broken the seal.
No, it had been an even longer time coming.
On Thursday 16th August 2007 I bought my first car. There she is in the photo above on the day she was scrapped. ‘Betty’. Named after a character in the Motion City Soundtrack song The Future Freaks Me Out (a quiet irony for you there). My subsequent cars have also been named after characters in songs by the same band (‘Coraline’ from Hold Me Down and ‘Antonia’ from erm, Antonia).
Some friends called her “Liam’s Party Bus”. I get the sense there might have been some irony to that also. This was a vehicle that required you to unlock the passenger door and reach across to open the driver door. When the same issue occurred on the passenger side I had to enter via the boot, much to the shock of one my former colleagues. It is crazy to think now that this was my car for the first 10 months of my ‘career’.
More importantly to this story though, she had a CD player (player, player, player, player). It was about as good as a 1990’s disc-man in that it skipped constantly whenever I went over the smallest of bumps. I didn’t think I could afford to change it for something that would connect to an MP3 player so I continued buying CDs at £9.99 + a go (a false economy?) well into the next decade. Even when vinyl first made it’s apparent comeback, I was still championing the pint-sized younger sibling.
Despite all this, on Thursday 12th January 2012, I signed up for Spotify. I might have been limited to CDs in the car, but there was no way I was passing up the opportunity of having “almost every song ever recorded” at “just one click away”.
Back to me staring at a wall in my box room in 2020
So, I’d adapted to streaming for video (helped along by improved broadband speeds and better TV functionality for running the apps) and the spell of buying CDs had been broken by a pre-longed period at home during the lockdown with little need to use my car (Antonia).
I didn’t have a functional need for the discs that would make it awkward if I needed to regularly access them. Shelves of spines aren’t all that visually impactful when you compare that to having nearly 1,000 Pez dispensers to display. My mind was made up. I was calling time.
Before I started boxing the DVDs up I cross referenced our collection against the titles that were currently available on the streaming services we had access to. For anything that wasn’t on there I took the disc out the case and put it into another almost redundant product, the disc wallet. You can probably count on one hand the number of times we’ve drawn from this selection since.
Back to Netflix
101 months and four price hikes later, I’d paid the Netflix corporation a grand total of £776.01.
An average DVD might have cost around £10 in 2014. I could’ve owned an additional 75 for the same money that I’ve paid for this streaming service alone. Except it might be more than that figure as streaming services have devalued the DVD to the point that the average price has dropped closer to peanuts. You could probably find actual peanuts that’ll cost you more than most titles.
With content, we accepted a world where we have access to everything, but own nothing.
I know that sounds dramatic and poetically dystopian, but in a very real sense it helped me solve my 2020 space issue.
Then something really interesting started to happen.
Emerging from the digital reliance of the pandemic and the oppressive advent of AI, I began to read stories about young people gravitating towards ‘retro’ technologies. The painful reality check for millennials being, it was our tech they’d discovered. The humble CD, the point and shoot digital camera.
They came for our fashion too, the generation 20 years younger than me dress in a style my peers and I abandoned long ago. This became carte blanche for every band of our era to stage a comeback, album anniversary tours, re-releases and festivals dedicated to the acts of our era. “It’s not just a phase” became the phrase that pays.
Amidst a sea of articles about the CD’s revival also came a warning – disc rot. Nobody was talking about this in 2020 when I boxed my collection up and relegated it to the garage. Essentially, as you might expect, few physical items are expected to last forever. The risk with the disc is that overtime it’ll erode (or is it corrode?) making the data pressed onto it unreadable. The timeline for this occurring speeds up if your CDs are stored poorly.
I nervously dug through the garage, uneasy about a few cracks in the otherwise sturdy storage boxes that might have allowed some moisture in. Alas, my collection seemed fine.
More months passed, I was less anxious about how the CDs were stored, more remorseful about where the CDs were stored. The uptick in sales and hyperbole generated weren’t enough to influence my decision to bring them back into the warm, but every article served as a reminder of the personal value this collection has to me.
I have a vinyl collection now that I could have only dreamed of in my youth, yet most of it has been purchased online, delivered through the post (then promptly returned and replaced until I got a copy not damaged by the post), added to my shelving unit and only retrieved once in a blue moon for a ceremonious spin akin to our grandparents having ‘best’ china.
My CDs have more of a story to them. They’ve all been played multiple times, some have been taken on long journeys, others kept me company on my commute to work or university. Many were bought with the only money I had left to my name at that point in time.
Here’s a chunk of my collection in a photo from my teenage bedroom in 2006. 20 years later I’m undecided if the UV damaged spines are frustrating or charming? (I’ve learnt my lesson now either way).
A fair few CD purchases were misfires on an initial listen. I used to take the type of gamble that’s now reserved for streaming and would be unfeasible for vinyl at it’s much higher price point in 2026.
So they’re coming back out of storage and going back on display. There’s some gaps in the collection I’ll fill, but I want it to be a fun, meaningful process, not a checklist to complete. I’m looking forward to getting back out and rummaging through the racks in record stores, to having another way to support the artists I see live at their merch table.
I don’t expect these CDs will be played much more frequently than my vinyl records, if at all. I’m not intending for this to be a functional collection this time around, more just tangible mementos from my travels and lived experiences. With our house back closer to it’s pre-COVID formation, I’ve even reserved a space for them to take pride of place once again.
After much deliberation, and then preparation, I’ve determined they’ll be stacked in chronological release order. I find this to be the most nostalgia inducing to look at.
And while the independent record stores may be higher on my priority list to visit, perhaps I’ll go buy a CD in HMV on re-opening day. 💿
