One thing that people who love CDs and people who hate CDs can agree on is that the format encourages the creation of big, fat, impossibly unwieldy blocks of music. Compact discs can store more information than vinyl and cassettes, and for a while in the ’90s, artists were obliged to fill up every last available byte of space on those silver discs, for better or worse. CDs therefore ushered in a golden (or “golden”) age of long-ass albums. Granted, in many cases this resulted in excessive records that only masochists (and possibly Matt Pinfield) ever played all the way through. But every now and then, a band managed to capitalize on the maxing-the-hell-out-of-your-record potential of the compact disc.
I love my CDs. I will never give them up and I I will keep buying them for as long as they remain available.