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The story
The UK’s Guardian newspaper reports that young people are making CDs cool again. According to department store chain John Lewis, searches for CD players have jumped 96% since July, partly driven by students buying them for their dorm rooms ahead of starting university.
On 5ch, the story sparked a wave of nostalgia, with posters swapping stories about lending cassette tapes, DAT Walkmans, and Discmans. The thread also lit up with a wired-vs-wireless earphone debate and a finer point of generational nitpicking: whether CDs count as “Showa retro” or “Heisei retro.”
CDs are apparently making a comeback among young people in the UK. The British newspaper The Guardian ran a feature titled “How young people are making CDs cool again,” digging into the reasons why.
According to a report from British department store chain John Lewis, searches for CD players in the UK have risen 96% since July. One likely factor is that students headed to university are buying CD players for their dorm rooms.
(Omitted)
Source: amass.jp / Original article here
What people said
Will the tiger wrestling mask boom make a comeback too? (a reference to the retro pro-wrestling "Tiger Mask" fad)
If it's a ladybug-shaped turntable, you could carry two at once
And when a girl you liked actually listened to one, that was the best feeling ever
I wonder if anyone did the same thing but with burned CDs instead
Back when MP3 players still had tiny storage, I used to swap out the songs every week
When couples broke up, they'd each pour their feelings into a song and send it to the other
and that's a hassle
Sometimes wired is just better since the battery never dies
What's so hard about just setting it down to charge before bed?
Once you've gone wireless, wired cables just feel like an annoying tangle — there's no going back
Well, even the next Prime Minister's bound to listen to them…
Supposedly ones in good condition were going for over 300,000 yen
Just looked it up and couldn't find any Cobra Top curlers going for a price that crazy
Wonder when this was even supposed to have happened
Maybe it'll be worth a fortune someday
A DAT Walkman, nice
Couldn't afford one back then, they were way too expensive
Take good care of it
Back then you barely even knew the song titles half the time
That came out as confusing Japanese
What I meant is: there's no going back from today's smartphone-and-wireless-headphone setup to the old wired-headphones-and-CD-player era
Too nostalgic, I actually teared up
Guess that's how it'll shift as the times change lol
In America they're saying vinyl LPs are already outselling CDs
Even after the CD era took over, "vinyl is cool" never really went away, right?
There are still musicians who insist on putting out LPs to this day
The Daiei Empire (a once-dominant Japanese supermarket chain)
Dom Dom Burger's actually been opening more locations lately
A 650MB CD holds 74 minutes, so
a 2.5MB HuCard would hold about 17 seconds
Max capacity was 2.5MB
You couldn't even fit one whole song
Sorry, never heard of it
Thought you meant the Walkman
After vinyl, CDs are bound to become collector's items next
Better buy them all up cheap at Book Off while you still can
Unlike vinyl, the problem with CDs is they degrade over time
Is this just an extension of the disposable "Utsurundesu" film camera trend?
Showa retro, huh
Polaroid cameras will probably make a comeback next
They weren't even that widespread yet by the end of the Showa era
Yeah, true
Vinyl was still hanging on in late Showa, and plenty of people were saying stuff like "CDs sound thin and flat"
I doubt Gen Z, who throw around "Showa retro" these days, can even tell the difference
Though it's kind of funny how the TV personalities milking bubble-era nostalgia only experienced the actual bubble as little kids at best — they're part of the "Ice Age" generation (Japan's lost-generation cohort hit hardest by the post-bubble job crunch)
https://preview.redd.it/in-1988-sony-released-the-d-88-discman-a-portable-cd-player-v0-abgidrs1djad1.jpeg?width=640&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=90fb21f69950d69b99736181646ebe2b33b6de1e
It's sticking out!
That's gonna get scratched to hell
Background and Key Points
The Guardian’s story sits inside a broader “physical media revival” that started with vinyl roughly a decade ago and has since pulled cassettes and now CDs back into fashion among UK teens and university students; John Lewis’s 96% search jump since July lines up with the back-to-school period, when dorm-room shopping lists get made. For Japanese readers, CDs carry a different weight: the format didn’t fully displace vinyl domestically until the very end of Showa (which ended in January 1989) and only became the default through the Heisei era, and Sony’s own D-88 Discman, referenced in the thread, dates to 1988. Japan is also unusual in that CDs never really went away commercially the way they did in the UK and US — physical sales have stayed a much larger share of the Japanese music market for years, propped up by idol and J-pop handshake-ticket bundling — a fact the thread never brings up even though it’s the most relevant point of comparison to the UK’s “rediscovery.”
Where the thread actually splits is generational labeling, not the CD trend itself: posters agree the format is having a moment, but argue over whether it should be filed as “Showa retro” or “Heisei retro,” since CDs were still a minority format when Showa ended and only won out afterward. A secondary, more casual split is wired versus wireless earphones — one side treats charging as a trivial nightly habit, the other treats a dead battery as a dealbreaker.
What’s easy to miss reading this in English is that the nostalgia here is doubly layered: Japanese posters aren’t just reacting to a British youth trend, they’re using it as a prompt to relitigate their own domestic media history.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Entertainment/Sports News+) thread “CDs Are Back Among British Youth: ‘Wearing a Portable CD Player with Wired Headphones Is a Way to Show Off Your Sense of Style’”.
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