Spotify, Apple Music, or whatever service you use is getting more fragmented and more expensive. You’re probably listening to the same set of albums over and over, like most people, too.
If that sounds like you, it might be a good idea to take the few dollars you spend on music streaming each month, and take a trip to your local thrift store instead, to start building a music collection worth having.
Thrift Stores Abound With Lossless Digital Music
Thrift stores, pawn shops, and their online equivalents are great places to buy the CD collections of people who have decided that they don’t need these plastic discs anymore. Also, every time I browse Facebook Marketplace there’s at least one person in my town selling what seems to be their entire CD collection.
Sure, 90% of them are going to be horrible compilation albums (Now That’s What I Call Atrocious), but the whole shebang is usually so cheap that you can buy it for one or two good albums, and then get your money back by selling the rest to people with no taste in music.
I’ve been to used goods stores where CDs have been marked down to whatever the smallest denomination you can get with sales tax included. A few cents apiece. They’ll even provide the shovel and wheelbarrow.
Jokes aside, we seem to be at a point where most people really don’t value physical music on CD anymore, which means it’s the perfect time to build the collection you could never afford when CDs were the only way to listen to digital music.
Ripping CDs Is Both Easy and Legal-ish
So you’ve bought a bunch of CDs, but what are you supposed to do with them? They won’t go in your phone, and that’s what you use to listen to your music! You need to “rip” the songs from the CD and then transfer them to your music-playing devices to enjoy them.
One part of the puzzle is of course, a drive that can read CDs. Any old cheap USB DVD drive will do the job, though if you can afford a decent brand-name model, that’s going to be better for your CDs, and there’s less chance of read errors or slow performance. Then, you’ll need some ripping software.
Exact Audio Copy is the weapon of choice, as most audiophiles will tell you, but there are plenty of options. So, is it legal to rip CDs you own? That depends on where you live in the world, but in the United States, the RIAA says it “won’t usually raise concerns” as long as:
- You own the original authorized CD.
- The copy is for your own personal use.
- You don’t give copies away or sell them.
If you get rid of the original CD, you need to destroy the copies you made too. Also, while making a backup of a CD you own is generally OK, some CDs have copy protection (Sony is infamous for this) and breaking the copy protection of any media is in and of itself illegal under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or DMCA.
You Can Set Up a Music Server in Minutes
You can always just copy your ripped music to your phone or other device and play it from there, but if you want convenience similar to services like Spotify, you’ll want a music self-hosting solution. I use Plex Amp, which works well as a free solution if you just want to stream music around your house, but you need a Plex Pass to download music for offline play or for remote streaming.
A popular solution is the free and open-source software Navidrome. If you have an Android device, you can use the Symfonium app to connect to Navidrome and many other music servers, but Symfonium has a one-time fee. On an iPhone, you can use Amperfy.
When You Have Enough Music, Just Stop Paying
After a year of spending your streaming music budget buying CDs from thrift stores, I’m willing to bet you’ll have more than enough music to listen to for the foreseeable future. If you also feel you’ve now amassed enough music–you can just stop paying. Yes, I know it’s a revolutionary concept, but you can actually just keep enjoying your pristine CD-quality music without spending any additional money.
If anything ever goes wrong with your ripped music, well you still have the original CDs to rip the music again. Just take care of the discs by storing them in a cool, dry place out of direct sunlight. In most cases, they should outlive you!
What about new music? Well, when your favorite band or performer brings out a new album (which usually happens no faster than once a year) you can splurge on those albums or singles as they release, and add them to your store of pristine digital music. Now I only have to convince everyone on my Spotify Family Plan to switch back to CDs…
