Farewell to the car CD player, source of weirdly deep musical fandoms
Car manufacturers have stopped including CD players as most drivers use streaming – but with greater choice, are we losing something too?
Every time I get in my car and plug my phone in, an interstitial from Rosalía’s 2022 album Motomami starts playing. “A de alfa, altura, alien,” she recites on Abcdefg. “B de bandida, C de coqueta” – I can’t turn it off fast enough. I love Rosalía but the Apple Music app defaults to the first song in the alphabet in my catalogue whenever it’s connected to the car, and Abcdefg is it. Her cute little ABC drives me nuts. Obviously it doesn’t take long to switch to something else – the MP3s I still transfer on to my phone, like the inveterate iPod user I was, or pretty much all the music in the world ever on Spotify or the apps of NTS or Bandcamp. Rosalía sometimes appears further down the alphabet, though, when I sit in the driver’s seat – categorically the best place to listen to music alone – struggling to think of what to put on amid the endless possibilities.
No music fan is going to lament a state of affairs in which technology means that you could feasibly drive while listening to a radio station broadcasting from Antarctica rather than suffering through the ads on your local commercial FM. But the tyranny of choice (not to mention the lure of nostalgia) can make the comparatively limited days of the in-car CD player, or multi-disc changer, if you were fancy, seem highly attractive. Hold on to them if you’ve got them: from now on, car manufacturers in the UK will no longer include CD players on new models. The final outlier, the Subaru Forester, has been revamped without one. Instead, new car stereos will be geared towards streaming, making the staple of the last 40 years of in-car entertainment obsolete.
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