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.
Some have questioned the move as CD sales were up 3.2% in the first half of 2024. Kim Bayley, the CEO of digital entertainment and retail association ERA, said: “With 15% of the UK adult population reporting that they listen to CDs in their cars, this is a remarkably shortsighted move by carmakers to stop fans listening to the music they love.”
But you can’t really argue with the inevitable march of history, nor justify making extra versions of cars just to serve a small minority. You could argue that in-car CD players have an appealing simplicity compared to the pitfalls of connecting phones through unreliable Bluetooth/USB interfaces (Spotify is ceasing operations of its poorly reviewed “Car Thing” in December), though the footwells filled with cracked and splintered jewel cases tell the truer story about convenience. The only real case for what is soon to be lost, I think, is that of a limited selection of music in the car forcing you to spend time with it, forging deep and often weird attachments – sometimes to entirely unexpected records – in the process. (Just this week, I walked past a parked car that had the same old red inflatable CD holder on the dashboard as I used to have and I felt a furious pang for the 12 painstakingly selected albums mine used to contain.)
As I wrote when Oasis reunited, the CD changer in Dad’s car (Mum’s only had a cassette deck) was a portal to childhood music discovery. Aged six, I knew nothing of Britpop or even Liam or Noel; I just knew the pure pleasures of (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? and how the sloshing intro to Champagne Supernova was a great way to taunt my little brother when he needed a wee. That album was the soundtrack to the first year I started at a new school. Dad always drove me in: I can still remember the profound embarrassment when he suddenly turned the volume down while I was singing along to try to trick me into continuing unaccompanied. Before long, I had my own designs on the CD player and would force the Spice Girls in among Enya (we in the backseat hated Enya) and the Beautiful South, which I didn’t like but it at least seemed excitingly grownup. It had a “parental advisory: explicit content” sticker (ie contained swearing) and whatever “this could be Rotterdam or anywhere / Liverpool orange” – orange pronounced the French way, as I heard it as a kid – might mean, it sounded terribly sophisticated. After a Christmas trip to Disneyland Paris, Dad would blast the awful Disney-penned Christmas carol Chante, C’est Noël at the height of summer to make the now three-strong denizens of the back seat squeal for mercy.
At the same time as car CD players became commonplace in the 90s, British supermarkets were giving over significant square footage to entertainment sections during the CD boom. Their parallel rise gave way to a new era of signings that the whole family could listen to in the car without risk – no saucy “Liverpool orange” here. The so-called Mondeo Man, an aphorism purloined from Tony Blair, supposedly pushed Britpop towards more middle-of-the-road territory; come the early 00s, a certain kind of consumer put debut albums by the likes of Joss Stone, Jamie Cullum and Michael Bublé in the trolley alongside the latest bits for a Jamie Oliver recipe. The prevalence of young millennials at recent gigs by James Blunt, Keane and Texas suggests the long-tail effects of this in-car exposure.
A certain stripe of music fan would find this entirely lamentable, a moment paving the way for the rise of the “new boring”. But if there is fondness to be had here, it’s for one of the last communal family listening experiences, even if it only gave you something to chafe against, jamming on your headphones in the back seat to listen to the very anarchist and entirely non-corporate sounds of, for example, Avril Lavigne on your MiniDisc player instead.
The last time I regularly drove a car with a CD player, the door pocket selections were Pet Shop Boys’ Super, Paramore’s After Laughter and Calvin Harris’s Funk Wav Bounces Vol 1, giving me an enduring fondness for each one. I wouldn’t trade my current setup – on my last long drive, I toggled between Alan Sparhawk, MJ Lenderman and Amyl and the Sniffers at the flick of a finger while at traffic lights – but those soundtrack limitations fostered a weird and lasting personal canon. Save Oasis, my formative car classics aren’t records you will find on a list of 1,000 albums you must hear before you die, but a wonky, rudimental sort of musical ABC and family history that I cherish.