WARNING: FIRST-WORLD PROBLEMS AHEAD! TURN BACK NOW IF YOU’RE EASILY OFFENDED!
Remember my last post where I mentioned someone dropped off a bunch of tech goodies at our store? One of those things was a big plastic CD tower, the kind where you can slot in your CD cases so you can see the labels easily. I took it home and put in my CDs, but some of them wouldn’t fit.
If you look closely, you can see in the CD cases I stacked next to the tower that one of them is taller than the others. That’s Coldplay’s Viva La Vida, the digipak version. I don’t know who at Capitol Records thought it would be a good idea to make the cardboard sleeve a whole damn half an inch wider, but because of that I can’t put it in my tower, and the collection will forever look just a little bit incomplete. Well, at least until I find a different case for it, or get a different display. But then there’s Mellon Collie.
The Smashing Pumpkins’ Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness is a very long album, and as such it was released on two discs. That means it couldn’t fit in a standard CD case, so it’s in a special double-wide case. It’s not alone either, many double-length albums are in similar cases. Unfortunately, the manufacturers of both the CD case and the tower didn’t account for each other or collectors like me.
That got me thinking about all the other grievances I have as a CD collector. As a preservationist, nothing scares me more than my media suddenly becoming unreadable. Unfortunately, it’s a fallen world, and there are certain things we can’t avoid. One of those things is disc rot, when a CD becomes unreadable because of damage or exposure to certain chemicals or environmental conditions which leave it vulnerable to oxidation.
I try to keep my CDs in the best conditions I reasonably can, but all CDs will degrade after long enough. There are archival-grade CDs out there, but no retail music CDs are made of that grade. The fact that one day my entire collection could be wiped out for good terrifies me. I do rip my CDs to my PC in AIFF format using iTunes, but there’s something special about having and playing the original copy.
But besides data loss concerns, there are other things that are annoying about CDs. For one thing, the hinges on CD cases are ridiculously easy to break. Ask any CD collector, they all have at least one CD case with a broken hinge. It really hurts when it’s a CD you love or have a lot of memories with; my copy of Trench by Twenty One Pilots has a broken hinge, and around the time it was released I was a TØP fanatic. I found so much comfort in their music and the community. One of my best friends at the time helped me pre-order the CD (and cassette tape, which is insanely cool.) Unfortunately, because that CD got a lot of use, that made it become prone to breaking.
I don’t think I have to even tell you how easy it is to scratch CDs. Just setting a CD down label-up on a table, even one that’s perfectly smooth, can scratch it. Heck, I think I’ve even scratched a few CDs by putting them in and taking them out of a CD player. And of course, when you lend a CD to a friend, as soon as you get it back it looks like this:
I’m not saying I don’t like CDs or collecting them. I love them, they provide the easiest and best way to buy copies of high-quality digital audio (seriously, CD quality audio is insanely good. I can’t tell the difference between a CD and digital masters most of the time.) But like any music format, CDs aren’t perfect.
Now who wants me to roast vinyl next?
KIENAN TOY 
