My car has a CD player. It sounds a lot better than the radio or any streaming service's compressed audio. I used to have a SiriusXM subscription and their audio quality was absolute garbage. I don't pay for any streaming music services now, and have no plans to ever do so.

I buy CDs of every band I like, because I know that music will last in its perfect quality form for decades and nobody but burglars can take it from me. I use my blu-ray burner to rip them to high-bitrate MP3s for phone and Plex library usage.

I also have a pile of records that I don't listen to because I don't have room to set up my record player right now.

I have an external CD/DVD player that is used solely to rip CDs and add to my media server. I abhor renting music and ripping a CD gives me the format and quality I like (!1000kbps flac) and future proofs me if tech limits change down the road. I used to rip to ogg but a few years ago I reripped about 500 CDs to flac.

I don't think it's a hipster thing anymore, I understand why: aesthetically vinyl are nicer than cds. You have a large cardboard with artworks. I might buy one from an artist whom art I like, and never actually play it.

my dad has a huge collection of CDs he started in the 80s. and he's not gonna stop buying every single CD that his favourite bands release.

he rips them onto his ipod and his phone. great way to efficiently own music and get some pretty cool artwork.

so from what i can tell, no one (that i know of) buys CDs to play them out of a playback device, just to own your library.

Vinyls are cool to display. Wouldn't be surprised if lots of people bought them only for display and kept listening the music on Spotify.

I don’t think vinyls are hipster. In the age of music digitalization, it is nice to own a physical piece of media, in addition to being able to support your artist more directly. Also it looks nice.