CD players make a comeback as young music fans embrace the physical format

John Lewis said searches for CD players rose 96% since July, possibly owing to students heading to university and buying systems for their rooms. The £79 Crosley Voyager and £129 Pure Classic C-D6 are both sold out online, with the Voyager scheduled to return in October. Portable CD players are also popular, the department store said.

CD sales themselves are growing. A report this year found that CD sales are up 16%, compared with vinyl's 2.4%. HMV reports that CD sales are up 10% year on year, thanks to artists often providing unique content on the format. "K-pop has been a massive driver, with BTS the most obvious example of artists that have led the resurgence," said managing director Phil Halliday. "But it goes much wider than that. We're seeing very strong CD demand around artists like Olivia Rodrigo, Ariana Grande and Olivia Dean."

Price is a factor, with a vinyl record typically costing about £35 versus £12 for a CD. Tom Morgan-Freelander, deputy editor of technology magazine Stuff, attributes the change to consumers wanting to move away from using their phones, better audio quality, and limited disposable income. "It's: 'I don't want to spend money on a turntable and the speakers that go with it. I want to spend £150 on an all-in-one system that comes with the CD player,'" he said.

In the CD aisle of an HMV in London on a weekday morning, people in their teens and twenties browsed. Milo Georgeaux-Healy, 14, chose two Dua Lipa albums and Brat by Charli xcx to play on an old boombox. "I like them because they're cheaper," she said. "They're a lot more compact [than vinyl], and I find that they have better quality than your phone." Adel Alsehi, 27, visiting from Riyadh, selected a Madonna greatest hits, a Kacey Musgraves album and Private Dancer by Tina Turner. "It gives me a different feeling," he said. "I feel like I'm listening to an artist's work. It brings me joy."

Richard Farnell, who runs Vinyl Exchange in Manchester, where they also sell CDs, said the people buying CDs are now younger, and cost is a big part. "The record labels started to up the price of vinyl and it became largely unaffordable for this demographic," he said. A copy of Oasis's Definitely Maybe on original UK pressing can sell for £150 to £250, while the standard vinyl reissue is around £25 to £30, but in his shop the CD version costs only £4.

The CD revival is part of a wider fashion for retro tech, alongside the vinyl resurgence, cassettes and wired earphones. "The vinyl revival re-established our appetite for analogue, and now we're seeing that broader love for physical music drive a genuine surge in CD players," confirmed Katrina Mills, category buying lead for audio and imaging at John Lewis.

Brand strategist Alexi Gunner described the trend as "performative audiophilia." "Someone walking around with a portable CD player and wired headphones is signalling their sense of taste and cultural capital," he said. He argues that the return to physical music is a kind of rebellion. "The status quo is streaming platforms and wireless audio on identical iPhones," he said. "All this has taken away the haptic, sensorial quality of listening to music."

J'Nae Phillips, who writes about Gen Z trends on her Substack Fashion Tingz, agreed. "When music is effectively infinite and frictionless, something is appealing about having to choose an album, put a disc in and listen to it from beginning to end," she said, and echoed the point about cultural cachet: "There's a certain cultural cachet in showing that you're interested in music as an object and an experience, rather than simply consuming whatever happens to be recommended by an algorithm."

Arguably, the CD is the final revival available to young people, being the last music format before the MP3 arrived in the early 2000s. However, Gunner suggests the USB stick may be next, noting that Fred Again named his 2025 tour after the portable drive. "It's the most common format that a DJ will carry their music to a gig on," he said. "In the frame of performative audiophilia, you're showing that you're not just listening to music, you are possibly a DJ, you are a tastemaker… it's something that will become more popular."