What Have You Done With Your CD Library? (If You’ve Done Anything With It?)

noah | July 2, 2009 5:00 pm

One of our wonderful commenters posed this question in the wake of finding out that people were actually plunking down money for digital copies of Michael Jackson albums: What are people doing with their CD libraries these days–keeping them, transitioning over to digital storage, shifting to vinyl, or giving up on the whole idea of “owning” music altogether and switching over to a streaming service?

It’s an interesting question for me at this precise moment, because I’m actually apart from my physical-music library and am relying on a hard drive of stuff to take me through the next few months; I’m supplementing the occasional purchase on iTunes and Amazon, and my eMusic downloads, with a Rhapsody subscription for the purposes of test-driving new things that haven’t been marked down to a “I’ll give this a whirl” threshold. It’s definitely strange, because I’ve been collecting CDs fairly obsessively since I got my first five-disc changer in ninth grade (which was when I also worked two doors down from a used-CD store that gave me a nice discount on its wares… and I got paid in cash).

I haven’t sold any discs off yet; I wonder just how much money I’d get for them, because I’d imagine the used-CD market has softened as people either go digital or just allocate their spending resources to non-music-related purchases. But at least if people won’t take my old copies of Resident Alien and Maybe You’ve Been Brainwashed Too, I have options:

[Thanks to Throwdini! for the inspiration. Photo via fabbriciuse.] Recycle Junk Cd’s – Make A Disco Ball! [Metacafe]