40 years later, the CD still lives, but can we bet on 40 years of additional life? For good reason, since 2002, sales have been in free fall. The arrival of mp3 player then, very quickly plateformes de streaming musical take music from digital and physical to virtual.
And to add a layer, for some time, vinyl is regaining some popularity. Vintage is very fashionable and the turntable is once again becoming appreciated for its sound quality and its incomparable grain.
However, a small village still and always resists the invader. Faced with vinyl as an expensive collector’s item, the CD is still the physical medium that is sold the most because it is more affordable. In addition, many people still have a CD player in their car.
And among the genre that still sells abundantly in Compact Disc form today, there is the French rap. Thus, in 2021, OrelSan sold it 140,000 copies of his album Civilisationonly on CD. An album on which we find in particular The quest, one of the rapper’s flagship songs. In 2022, the CD is already a format with which we surf on the nostalgia for teenagers of the 2000s. Moreover, for Sophian Fanen, “When we speak to the public about rap, we speak to a very popular public. To release a vinyl album, that would be snobbish on the part of Orelsan”.
The turn of the disc seems definitively closed.