The Gift of Music: Do we buy CDs for loved ones anymore?

In the early 1990s, my friends and I used to always give each other CDs for birthday or Christmas presents. It was seen as a great gift, since everybody I knew loved music and CDs, being relatively new at the time, were seen as a premium item.

Also, we were all young – I was in my early 20s – and were still exploring the classic eras of the 1960s/70s/80s when it came to music, so someone might choose to buy me a Neil Young or Roxy Music album on CD that I simply didn’t know at all at the time and I would be delighted! I didn’t have much money and had only owned a CD player since early 1990, so I actively wanted people to buy me CDs and was disappointed when they didn’t! 

Fast forward 30 years and the reputation and perception of the humble CD, as a gift, has been somewhat battered. What sort of a gift is music anyway, these days, for the average Joe, when it’s basically available free via streaming and YouTube? If music is perceived by many as having close to no value these days, then has music become the gift no one wants to receive, or for that matter, to give?

It has been a long time since anyone has bought me music as a present. The general consensus seems to be that it would be a fool’s errand trying to buy Paul Sinclair physical music. “You’ve got everything, already!” appears to the understandable, if inaccurate, consensus. Or it would be impossible to know what to get me (more reasonable, to be fair). It’s sad, in a way, but friends and family possibly also think it would be a bit of a busman’s holiday for me (“the last thing he’s going to want is music!”). This is also not accurate, I still enjoy music as much now as I ever have!

My two daughters are 17 and 22 and they probably have a greater than normal interest in physical music, in part, I guess, because of their dad’s day job and because there’s so much in the house they have access to! The eldest is into K-Pop, a genre known for flashy packaging and multiple editions of the same album, while the younger of the two is massively into Taylor Swift, an musician and songwriter who has perfected the art of selling the same album over and over again, with multiple variants, ‘anthology’ editions and ‘Taylor’s Version’ re-recordings of old albums (which aren’t actually very old, in the scheme of things).

I was in HMV just before Christmas and thought I’d pick up some releases as presents or stocking fillers. American singer and songwriter and new ‘big thing’, Chappell Roan, has become a favourite with my youngest and I knew she didn’t own it physically, so I thought I’d get that. Now I love CDs as much as the next man, but they aren’t much more expensive than they were 30 years ago, which is good if you’re buying for yourself, but not so good if it’s a gift. A compact disc that cost £13 in 1991 should be over £29 in today’s money but they are still around £13 (or less). To put it another way buying a CD for someone today is like spending less than £6 on them in the early 90s. Fine as a stocking filler, I suppose, but if it’s any kind of ‘main’ present you are going to look like a bit of a skinflint.

There is no deluxe CD of Chappell Roan’s debut, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, despite it now being over a year old, just the standard edition in a card sleeve that was as light as a feather, when I picked it up. It just felt so insubstantial. Labels, probably a little frustrated that consumers won’t pay any more for CDs than they did 30 years ago, have made them as cheap to produce as possible, presumably in order to maintain some kind of reasonable profit margin. So they often come in a flimsy card sleeves, no inner sleeve for the disc, often a thin, minimal booklet. Despite all this, they still sell in large numbers and I’m convinced that frustrated executives at labels, having done nothing to support the format or plan for its future in the last 15 years – quite the opposite, you could argue – must be wondering what they have to do to make, this “inferior sonic storage system” (in the words of Elvis Costello) crawl into a hole and die? You can no longer play them in your car, tick! The mastering is often awful, tick! The packaging is perfunctory, tick! You can get the same content free – or close to free – on streaming, tick! And yet, people (including yours truly) still just like CDs and we continue to buy them.

The vinyl edition of The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess sitting next to the CD showed off the artwork beautifully, with a lovely embossed and die-cut outer sleeve, a gatefold package with printed inners and the two records pressed on ‘coke bottle green’ vinyl. To put it bluntly this vinyl edition was going to have a ‘wow’ factor when unwrapped which the CD definitely couldn’t replicate. I’m sure, with this album in particular, the two formats would sound fairly much the same, but because ‘young people’ primarily live in a world of streaming, the physical object has to feel worth owning, otherwise, what’s the point?

The price differential was massive. The 2LP set was £39.99, which on the face of it seems like a rip-off but is actually like spending £17.50 on someone in 1991. A single CD could sometimes edge towards that price, back then, believe it or not. In 2024 the CD of the Chappel Roan album was £13.99 in HMV. So this CD enthusiast ending up buying the vinyl. If I’d been purchasing for myself, I may have gone for the CD but for the reasons explained above, the vinyl seemed like a much nicer present. In fact, HMV had a CD sale upstairs so I did end up picking up various titles as a Christmas present to myself, including albums from The Pretenders, the Liam Gallagher and John Squire record, the ‘Careless Whisper’ CD single and a few others.

CD box sets or deluxe editions in hardcover book packaging and bonus discs still feel like decent packages for gifts but I’ll warrant that a single CD festively wrapped up with a bow on it, as a gift, didn’t change hands much over this holiday period. Or am I wrong? Do you still buy CDs as gifts? Leave a comment and let me know!