What CD binders say about 90s kids’ musical identity

Welcome to Dial Up, Mashable’s most excellent look at technology in the ’90s, from the early days of the World Wide Web to the clunky gadgets that won our hearts. 

Where to put the Modest Mouse CD? 

I didn’t want to put it right up front — too obvious that I was proud of it. But didn’t want to bury it too deeply. How would I find it easily? More importantly, what if someone browsing my collection didn’t get how important that album was to me?

These were the questions I asked myself while organizing my CD binders.

For you Gen Z kids out there, CD carrying cases were physical binders filled with pages where you would sheathe your favorite discs and album art. That way, you could consolidate your music collection into one browsable, portable package.

These binders came in multiple shapes and sizes, designs and colors, varying degrees of sturdiness. They were something you could slip into a backpack along with your Discman, or consign to living permanently in a book shelf or under a car passenger seat. One of my most beloved was a cheap red plastic one that always felt like it was one neglectful afternoon away from melting in the sun.

For a collector, filling up a binder was a point of pride. And the contents of the binder were a sort of musical reflection of the self.

Take, for example, the type of binder. Were you someone who chose to go with breadth? In that case, you would go for triple-ring, four-CDs-per-page binder. You were an encyclopedic collector who was loathe to go anywhere without the latest from the Red Hot Chili Peppers. My friend’s much older sister had one of these guys. Filled with Sublime and Bob Marley albums, no one seemed cooler than her.

Maybe you just needed the basics with you at all times. Instead of a binder, you had a multi-sleeve car visor attachment, with your ultimate driving albums available at any moment. In one friend’s car, Gorillaz and Flaming Lips albums were just a visor flip away from being popped into the CD player.

Letting someone flip through your CD binder was like letting them take a look at you

Or perhaps you were more of a specialist. Maybe you had multiple smaller binders, capable of holding 10 or 20 — not 200 — CDs at a time. This was my flavor of collecting. One of my binders held my all-time favorite albums, another was burned albums and great mixes made by friends. One of my binders was my shame CDs — Britney Spears, the Backstreet Boys, the Spice Girls — albums bought before I discovered indie rock. This one mostly stayed at home. 

Then there was the order of the CDs within the binder. What CD did you put on the first page? The last? Was your display chronological, showcasing the evolution of your collection? Was it thematic? Or practical, based on what your fingers grabbed for the most? Did you put your most prized possession on page one, where anyone perusing could see it? Or would you slip it nonchalantly into the center, showing, “Oh, this Modest Mouse album? I collect things like this all the time.”

With the binders, curation — a concept that is mostly just a vomitous buzzword now — was physical, and high stakes. Because space was much more limited than even the (now measly sounding) 1,000 digital songs the first iPod promised, choosing the music that came with you was more intentional, and personal. More than a scroll through the overwhelming amount of music in an iPod, letting someone flip through your CD binder was like letting them take a look at you. Deciding what to put in that binder was deciding what you wanted people to see.

The iPod did not do away with curation. Physical storage of purchased or burned albums in CD binders gave way to scores of iTunes playlists comprised of CDs you physically uploaded into iTunes, or perhaps illegally downloaded from Mega Upload. Maybe you even burned those playlists onto CDs. For a while there, iTunes and the CD binder were best friends; there were more (free) CDs to fill it up than ever.

And no, the iPod was not the death of curation — it was just the first step. Once Apple and Spotify provided all music, affordably, pirating became unnecessary. A win! But purchasing CDs, making playlists, and even pirating required knowledge: you had to seek out the music, rather than let it find you.

Proponents of AI music discovery say algorithmic curation makes it easier to find and access more good music than ever before. That may be true. But I certainly have to pay attention — hard — if I want to know who the new band Spotify is showing me actually is.

Apple Music, Spotify, and the iPhones we listen to music on these days are much more convenient than the bulky binders they displaced. But the CD binder stands in for the physical, personal relationship my generation used to have with our music. Its desuetude as a quirky, intimate object shows what we’ve lost.

My musical identity is still very much tied to what’s in those binders. I keep up with music blogs, and I favorite songs my Discover Weekly serves me so I can commit them to memory. But the songs that make me me are the ones written in permanent marker on the shiny surface of a CD, stored in a 20-disc hard shell, Case Logic binder at my parents’ house, somewhere. Spotify can suggest all the new songs it wants. But the zipper is shut.