Lately, I have been filling our home with piles and piles of CDs. I’m not alone: physical media (primarily vinyl, but also CDs) have been on an upward sales trend for the past five years.
But unlike vinyl collectors or tastemakers looking for rare albums, I am listening to CDs as a parenting move because of my 8-year-old daughter.
I didn’t want her to listen to AI slop
As she grew out of the “Baby Shark” music of her toddlerhood and into appreciating rock, pop, hip-hop, and folk, I wanted her to have the opportunity to explore on her own and the freedom to choose what she liked.
But when I put Spotify in my daughter’s hands, she would scroll, listen for a few seconds, then scroll again. She would become mesmerized by the short videos that play with the music.
She would try searching for “narwhal” or “axolotl” and find AI slop songs. The final straw came when dozens of playlists popped up in the search results with NC-17-looking playlist cover art. I looked down at my phone screen filled with anime seductresses, and I was done forever with trying to let my child navigate Spotify on her own.
I gave my child a pile of CDs
An experiment ensued: a CD player and a pile of CDs. My CD player in 2026 is handsome, wooden, and Bluetooth-enabled. She can pick anything. If streaming were a sprawling trash pile filled with needles, CDs are a playground with a beautiful fence. If streaming were an art museum with AI-generated animations suddenly flashing in front of the Mona Lisa, CDs are a quiet gallery with perfect light.
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Streaming wasn’t just harmful for my kid; it was harmful for me. I had grown increasingly dissatisfied as my personalized playlists served me more and more familiar tracks, sending me into the same well-worn rivulets of songs that are inoffensive and foolproof for me.
When I put on a CD, it is easier for me to surrender to letting it play from front to back. When I want to look up a lyric, I pull out the liner notes. There is no risk of my seeing a notification. The cover art might be faded and stiff, but it is not going to pivot to video. CDs are part of my war for presence, a small but crucial reclaiming of what it means to be still in a space and listen to a song.
We’ve been buying new CDs
I have been delightfully surprised to find that CDs are still readily available out there in the world, at thrift stores, estate sales, and even Target and Walmart. CDs have traits that children crave: they’re tactile objects made of glass and plastic that require careful handling. They come with their own context — the cover art, liner notes, track listing. Importantly, they come with very little censorship overhead for parents. In amassing a small CD collection for our family, I’ve replaced the constant “no”s and negotiations my daughter and I had over Spotify with music that is a hearty yes for me. Yes to Bonnie Raitt, yes to the Cranberries, yes to Soul and R&B Today.
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Vinyl records have a similar physicality, but CDs have a few key advantages over records, in my humble opinion. They’re smaller and cheaper. If you really want to, you can still burn almost any CD. And the audio quality of a CD is unbeaten, though lots of people have woo-woo beliefs to the contrary. The seduction of a needle dropping into a physical groove is real, but I’ll take the less romantic, plucky CD any day.
I’ve discovered new artists
Our joint adventure into CDs has blasted me out of the algorithmic doldrums and into a space of discovery and receptiveness. I’ve been listening to new-to-me artists like Lucinda Williams and Bill Evans. I dug up my old CD books and found mixes my friends made for long road trips. I remembered how central music was to life and friendship back when I was a teenager, and CDs reigned.
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I want my daughter to have that kind of deep relationship with music someday. She’s a typical 8-year-old who puts on Taylor Swift 90% of the time; every now and then, we rock out to Queen, Avril Lavigne, or The Donnas. When we look for something to listen to together, we just scan our plastic cases and pick something. We get to the fun part faster. She digs the new Muna record, which has an apropos track, “Big Stick,” in which lead singer Katie Gavin becomes the voice of the algorithms that rule our lives, chanting, “I can make you want what I want you to.”
We dance, we holler, and I enjoy the satisfaction of knowing that no one is making us want anything we haven’t chosen for ourselves.
