After decades of streaming and digital, music fans returning to some old-school ways

The arrival of Napster in the summer of 1999 jerked music fans away from analogue media into the world of digital. Now, though, we're seeing an interesting course correction.

Somewhere in a box in my crawlspace is a silver first-gen iPod Nano, which was my gateway drug into the Apple universe. It’s probably tucked away with a first-gen iPod Touch. Sitting on a shelf in my home office are two old-school iPods. One is the red-and-white special U2 edition that I bought in October 2024. Next to it is a white fourth-generation unit, the first with the touch-sensitive click wheel, which I somehow acquired about 10 years ago.

Elsewhere in the house, I have a couple of DVD players I no longer use, along with a Blu-ray player that got disconnected due to underuse. And back in the crawlspace is a Pioneer LaserDisk machine from some time around 1995, along with a cache of the massive 12-inch discs it used. I kept them out of sheer nostalgia. I consider them museum pieces that will never be used again. Then again…

Music fans — especially Gen Z — are getting a little disenchanted with new-fangled digital ways. Tired of having to have an app and a subscription for everything, there’s a movement afoot to return to somewhat simpler times. Not only have sales of vinyl increased by double digits every year since 2008, but CD sales are also slowly stabilizing after years of decline. And lately, there has been an uptick in interest in CDs, Blu-ray discs and plain old iPods. What’s going on?

Psychologists point to the fact that nostalgia tends to spike during times of economic and political uncertainty, both of which are in ample supply thanks to the Trump era, Ukraine, the lingering post-COVID fallout, and dire economic prospects; we’re looking for things that remind us of the good old days.

The vinyl revival has been discussed ad infinitum over the last decade. People want something that’s forever theirs, a tactile representation of the music they love. They come with artwork, liner notes and lyric sheets. They can brag to their friends about how many linear/cubic feet of their home are dedicated to an ancient, highly inconvenient music storage format. A turntable? Don’t need one. One study says that 50 per cent of vinyl buyers don’t own a record player. If they want to listen to the music, they can stream it, leaving the vinyl in pristine shape forever.

While there’s no technological need for a return to the cassette era for listening to music — who even has a working cassette player anymore? — they are finding a second life as souvenirs, collectibles and tchotchkes. Although Luminate, the official counter of music things sold, doesn’t break out weekly sales of cassettes in stores — they’re included in a category label as “other” (only 3,300 “other” products have been sold so far this year in Canada), many more are being sold off the books by indie and DIY artists. Because production costs are low, young artists can make a decent profit by selling them at gigs. It’s the audio equivalent of supporting a band by buying a T-shirt.

Apple stopped making its last iPods on May 22, 2022, bringing production of the device to an end after 21 years. Given the focus on the iPhone, it was amazing that the iPod lasted that long. But now, millennials and Gen Zers are either firing up old iPods or scrounging online or searching stores for gently used players.

There’s a certain romanticism to this, much like we saw with cassette mixtapes. Fire up an old iPod, and chances are you’ll find music of a bygone era when life was simpler. They’re an attempt to reclaim autonomy in the era of the algorithm.