Music formats die slow, lingering deaths. The CD has been succumbing for more than two decades – sales peaked in 2000 – but now it may have suffered its final, fatal blow: the last model of car to include a CD player has already been built. According to Which magazine, as of this year Subaru Forester SUVs will no longer accommodate CDs, and the only new vehicle you can buy with a CD player in it is the Isuzu D-Max, which is actually a truck.
Because they are replaced infrequently, cars have always extended the life of old audio technology, serving as travelling museums of sound. The first car with a factory-installed dashboard CD player appeared in 1985, but it would take many of us years to catch up. Long after my family had switched to exclusively CDs in the house, our secondhand car still just had a cassette player, and its door wells were filled with classic tapes such as The Wheels on the Bus and Other Songs. When that car finally went for scrap the cassettes went with it, and an era abruptly came to an end.
Our next car had a CD player, and over time we assembled a travelling collection of music that we kept in a portable zip-up case, one CD per plastic leaf. I almost always updated its contents before a long trip, only realising I’d left it on the kitchen table after we’d set off.
On those occasions our family holiday was soundtracked by the one stray CD we managed to find under the seats. We’d play it over and over until we knew all the words to every track. The lack of choice was actually pretty liberating – in a car full of kids, too much choice is a drawback, up to a point. One dark summer that single, salvaged CD was disc 2 of Now That’s What I Call Music! 61. If I remind you that’s the one that has Crazy Frog on it, you’ll have an idea of how traumatised I was by the end of the week.
We played CDs in the car for a long time, long after there were no CD players left at home, even after our oldest computers had no slots for discs. New CDs still appeared from time to time. Bands still produced them, and people still bought them at gigs, the way they did vinyl. When people in bands gave me their CDs, I always said: “Thanks, I’ll give it a listen.” But what I meant was: I’ll listen to it in the car.
For what now seems a brief interval that was the way it was: CDs were for the road only, and on the road the old rhythms of music-listening were still honoured. You put in a CD and forgot about it until it was over. You didn’t have to curate your choices, or let an algorithm give you more of the same until your brain melted. For the duration of a journey at least, you were inclined to think that maybe the old way was better.
All that ended for me when we got a new car a few years ago, suddenly leap-frogging a decade in terms of audio technology, with all the music in the world now available in-car, through my phone. I honestly don’t know what became of the CDs in the old car – I think they were still in it when we left it on the dealer’s forecourt. It didn’t even occur to me to keep them. Once again an era, and the music that went with it, met an unceremonious end.
I’ll tell you a secret: the new car actually does have a CD player, but it’s stowed away in the glove box, as if it were unseemly to have that fat horizontal slot on display. By including it – and hiding it – I felt the manufacturers were making a number of unflattering assumptions about me: we know you are old; we know you still like to listen to those old Jeeves and Wooster audiobook CDs you got free with a Sunday newspaper in 1997, but we also know you’re ashamed of it.
These perceived assumptions were enough to put me off: I’ve never used the CD player, though I am secretly – and a little shamefully – reassured by its invisible presence.
Tim Dowling is a regular Guardian contributor
