There is something deeply satisfying about collecting physical music in an age when practically every song ever recorded is sitting somewhere on the internet waiting to be streamed. I know I can open Spotify, YouTube, Apple Music, or whatever other service I happen to be using and find an enormous percentage of the music I could possibly want to hear. I know that, technically, I don't need a wall of CDs. I don't need jewel cases taking up space. I don't need to hunt through garage sales, thrift stores, used record shops, flea markets, or online marketplaces looking for old albums. I don't need to spend time wondering whether a particular CD is going to be scratched, whether the case is cracked, whether the booklet is missing, or whether the disc is actually inside the damn case. And yet, here I am. I have started collecting CDs. It wasn't necessarily something I expected to become particularly invested in. For a long time, physical media felt like something that be...

 One of the reasons I think I have developed such an appreciation for collecting physical music is because I grew up around people who have been doing it for years. Long before streaming services became the dominant way people listened to music, buying albums was simply how you experienced new releases. If you wanted to hear your favorite artist whenever you wanted, you bought the album. That mindset has never really disappeared in my family, and looking back, I think it quietly influenced my own interest in building a collection. These days, almost any song you can think of is available through a streaming service. That convenience is incredible, and I use it all the time. But there is still something special about walking over to a shelf filled with CDs, picking out an album, and knowing it is part of your family's collection. It feels personal in a way that scrolling through a digital library sometimes does not. My family has accumulated quite a collection over the years. It w...

  Where to Actually Find Physical Media (And How to Not Overpay for It) So after that last post about starting my CD collection, I got a handful of messages and comments asking some version of the same question, which was basically, okay, that's cool, but where do you even find this stuff anymore. And it's a fair question, honestly. We've spent the last decade or so watching physical media sections shrink in stores, watching entire chains disappear, watching the culture around browsing shelves for music or games or movies fade into something a lot of younger folks never even experienced firsthand. So I get why the question comes up. If you didn't grow up in the era of physical media being the default, it's not obvious where you'd even start looking. So I wanted to put together a follow up post specifically about that, about how to actually find physical media in a world that's mostly moved on from it. I'm going to be talking about this mostly through th...

 So a few weeks back I made a post on my Instagram that I honestly didn't think would get the reaction it did, which was basically me announcing, somewhat sheepishly, that I've started a CD collection. And I know how that sounds. In a world where literally everything is streaming, where you can pull up any song ever recorded in about four seconds flat, where your phone holds more music than any physical shelf ever could, here I am going out of my way to buy little plastic discs. It's wild, honestly, even to me, and I laughed a little writing that caption because I could already picture people reading it and going "wait, CDs? like, actual CDs?" Yes. Actual CDs. And I wanted to take some time here, since this is my music blog after all, to actually sit with why I'm doing this, because it's not a decision I made lightly or randomly. It's been building for a while, and I think it says something bigger about where I'm at with music, with ownership, and ...