I recently made a move that many music fans are quietly considering: ditching Spotify for CDs / MP3s.
Why? Because I realised I was paying over £150 a year just to listen to the exact same 50 songs on repeat during my daily drive.
Between work, surviving 9-month-old behaviour changes at home, and making sure the dog doesn’t get fat from eating dropped baby food, my commute is the only time I get to myself.
When Spotify announced another price hike, I decided enough was enough.
I headed out to the garage, dusted off a plastic crate from 2010, and proved that ditching Spotify for CDs wasn’t just a fun trip down memory lane, it was a huge win for my wallet.
The £3.64 Minimum Wage Era
I’m not entirely sure who to blame for the ridiculously large stack of CDs and DVDs currently residing in my garage. But if I had to point a finger, it would probably be at my 17-year-old self, fresh out of school and pocketing an adult wage from my first retail job in a supermarket.
To put that into perspective: the UK minimum wage for a 17-year-old in 2010 was only £3.64 per hour.
I, on the other hand, was pulling in a glorious £7.00 to £8.00 an hour working supermarket shifts around my college studies.
Honestly? I don’t think I’ve felt as rich since!
I’m not some mega-audiophile hoarder; I just love music.
But, I like exploring music so if I liked a single on the radio, I’d buy the whole album.
So I have some truly awful songs in my back catalogue.
The Saturday Plan
Before 2009, any CDs I owned were Christmas or birthday gifts. But after landing my first job, buying music became a weekly weekend thing I went and did.
On a drizzly Saturday, I’d get the bus into Durham City centre.
- First stop: The Lloyds Bank on Silver Street, to pull a crisp £20 note out of the hole in the wall.
- Second stop: Straight down the high street to HMV.
It’s genuinely sad that HMV isn’t in the prince bishops shopping centre anymore.
The brand collapsed into administration just a few years after my regular shopping spree began.
In a funny twist of fatherhood, the site where I used to spend my hard-earned cash on rock and indie CDs is now Bertie’s Play Barn. I’ve also gone from buying albums to supervising soft play!
HMV was a massive loss for local high streets. Going to HMV was an event. It got teenage me out of the house for an hour or so.
Sadly, the brand stood still while the world moved fast.
They failed to challenge digital giants, ignored online postal delivery (Tesco was delivering CDs online way before HMV got their act together!), and were eventually swallowed up by iTunes, Amazon, and streaming.
Dial-Up Speed, Viruses, and the 30GB Laptop Stash
To teenagers today, holding onto physical discs must sound weird. “Why didn’t you just download or stream it?”
Well, back in the late 2000s streaming wasn’t a thing yet and downloading an entire album without superfast broadband took hours.
Back then, I could get the bus into Durham (15 mins for me), buy a physical CD, and get back home quicker than it took to download an album.
Plus, the early internet was still a digital Wild West. Putting your card details into a form on the internet wasn’t advised.
And if you went the dodgy free Limewire / Napster / Piratebay sort of route and you could easily infect the family computer with a virus that took ages to fix, on a PC that already took two minutes just to boot up!
Because of these things, I bypassed the MP3 download era entirely and kept my CDs.
In fact, I still have over 30GB of music saved on an old laptop from those days, which happens to be the exact music I’m looking at using for my commute.
The Financials: Ditching Spotify for CDs vs. Streaming Costs
When you break down the math, ditching Spotify for CDs isn’t just an eccentric nostalgia trip; it makes solid financial sense for any household budget.
| Format | Average Cost | Do You Own It? |
| Spotify Premium | £12.99 / month – £155.88 / year | ❌ No |
| Amazon Digital MP3 Album | £9.99 – £10.29 | ⚠️ Digital file only |
| Brand New CD (Amazon) | £7.99 – £9.99 | Physical disc + autorip |
| Second-Hand CD (eBay / Vinted) | £1.50 – £3.00 | Physical disc forever |
If I for example want Eminem’s The Marshall Mathers LP, Amazon charges £10.29 for the digital MP3 download.
But I can pick up the original CD on Vinted or eBay for £2.00 with a little cost for delivery.
Or I can go to a local independent music shop, or car boot, or market stall.
Then I own it for life. Zero monthly fees.
I could buy 4-6 albums per month on CD and break even.
Why CDs Sound Better Than Vinyl (Yes, Really!)
There’s been a massive revival in vinyl recently, with records now outselling CDs for the first time in decades. But as much as people love the aesthetic of dropping a needle onto a turntable, CDs produce objectively superior sound quality.
Anyone who claims vinyl sounds better is romanticising the experience.
While vinyl has a lovely, warm analog noise, CDs offer a much wider dynamic range, zero surface hiss, and lower distortion.
Unless you scratch them, a CD sounds identical on its 1,000th play as it did on its first.
Rescuing the Garage Stash
When we moved into our new home, my boxes of CDs were shoved into the garage and forgotten about.
I did briefly consider selling them on MusicMagpie or eBay. But after looking at the numbers, scanning hundreds of barcodes for 10p a pop or spending hours at a car boot sale on a Saturday morning just isn’t worth my time.
I’d rather spend that weekend time with my daughter or strap her into our Ergobaby Embrace carrier for a dog walk.
Much like the project where I digitised 30 years of old family VHS tapes, revisiting my CD collection turned out to be a fantastic trip down memory lane.
The Dad Storage Problem (And What I’m Doing Next)
So, here I am with 30GB of 2000s and 2010s music ready to go… but there’s a catch.
I can’t actually put any of it onto my smartphone.
If you’re a parent, you already know why: my phone storage is 99% full of thousands of photos of my daughter, plus 500 videos of the dog looking cute on the sofa.
There is physically zero room left for 3,000 MP3s!
Rather than paying Apple or Google for even more cloud storage, I’ve decided my next move is to go proper retro and buy a dedicated MP3 player / Digital Audio Player (DAP) to keep in the car for my commute.
I’ve been looking closely at the HiBy Music R1, it’s super compact, takes a MicroSD card so I can load my entire 30GB library, and won’t drain my phone battery while driving. If I end up getting it I’ll be sure to make a review once I’ve used it for a month or so.
I Need Your Recommendations!
Have you made the switch back to physical music or standalone MP3 players? Have you used the HiBy R1, or do you have another budget DAP / music player you’d recommend for a daily commute?
Drop a comment below and let me know what you’re using, or tell me what album you’d listen to first if you dug out your old CD collection today!