U.S. CD revenue jumped 58.6% in the first half of 2026, reversing last year's decline. The industry will call this nostalgia. It isn't, or at least it isn't only that. It is a correction.
Physical Media as Protest Against the Rental Economy
Streaming gave everyone access and took away ownership. You don't own your Spotify library. You license it, month by month, and it can be revoked when a label dispute happens or a service shuts down. A CD is yours. It plays when the internet is down, when the subscription lapses, when the platform pivots. The same logic drove Nicolas Cevallos's essay on iPods as modern heirlooms: the desire to buy for forever in an age of disposable goods. The CD boom is that desire made legible in sales data. It connects directly to the vinyl resurgence that preceded it, and to the broader pattern of people reaching for objects that have edges, weight, and permanence in a cultural landscape that is increasingly frictionless and therefore forgettable.
IFA 2026, Christie's, and the Object's Comeback Across Categories
The gadgets at IFA 2026 are still chasing seamlessness, voice control, invisible interfaces. The market is moving the other way. Christie's Beverly Hills is hosting a selling exhibition of fifty chairs, design classics alongside contemporary pieces, aimed explicitly at a new generation of collectors who want to own physical things that carry meaning. A. Lange & Söhne just dropped new mechanical watch editions at Concours of Elegance. These aren't coincidences. Across music, furniture, horology, and consumer electronics, the object is staging a comeback against the algorithm, and people are paying for the privilege of holding something that doesn't need a software update to work.