My personal Instagram account celebrates “Lost Formats”. I have shared photos of wire recorders, cylinder records, Betamax videos, and stereoscopes. I once shared a picture of my CD collection calling those shiny discs a “Lost Format”, and I was only half joking. Having moved almost a billion units domestically in 2000, only 31 million CDs were sold in the US in 2022. Following the classic 80/20 rule we would expect to find 2.8 million Americans buying 25 million CDs and fewer than 400 thousand others buying one or two. If that is accurate less than 1% of the population purchased a CD in 2022.
Your average person under 35 has never bought a single CD, many have never purchased a whole album, even digitally. They do not own music, they stream it as needed. Separate them from an internet connection and they have nothing to listen to. If younger millennials own any physical media it was inherited from parents or siblings or is part of a vinyl hobby acquired in adulthood. Walmart has a section for new LPs after all, but no CDs. Many teenagers, Gen Z, don’t even own a stereo. They use a phone, computer, or TV for streaming music.
Bearing the distinction of being the last physical audio medium a Compact Disc is essentially a memory card for transferring digital audio files between machines that was made redundant by broadband internet and Bluetooth. Their remaining importanc
