Yesterday was the last day of Bookstock, a local week-long used book sale that’s held at a nearby mall to raise additional money for Detroit schools. It was rainy and crummy outside so I went that and ended up picking up a lot of cds from the 90s and 00s from artists like Enya, Tori Amos, Zero 7, Midnight Oil, Mazzy Star, and Sarah McLachlan. On top of the cds already being cheap, everything was also half off so they could get rid of as much as possible. Of course I ripped all the cds to my plex server while reading the booklets, something I really enjoy from the cd era. What no one told me though, and I guess why would they, is that Sarah McLachlan’s album Surfacing is a fucking multimedia cd-rom??

It will probably surprise no one that I absolutely lost my shit when I realized this and it made me so happy with absolutely no irony. You can choose between two applications. There’s the catalogue where you can look up various items to order, like cds, prints, vhs tapes, and jewelry. There’s also an electronic press kit about all of her albums.

I realize that I’m the only person getting excited about this in 2025 but man, those colors and fonts! I wish most cds had done this. I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned that I’ve leaned much more into cd collecting this last year but making a Plex server really pushed me into it. I still get to have a nice little physical piece of art to accompany the music but it’s so much cheaper than having a vinyl record, which is the opposite of how things were when I had started collecting records. I don’t know if I buy that Gen Z is going to bring back the cd format but I have been having fun picking up cds at an incredibly low cost and have even bought a few through Bandcamp as well. Anyway, if you’re a musician reading this, have you considered paying a developer to put together a little program listing all of your works, biography, maybe song clips, video, and all that with your album? Because I will be the first in line to buy your album if you do.

By contrast, this is what I get when I put in the Zero 7 album. Boooooooo