Now That’s What I Call a Lost Art: The Case For Compilation CDs

Summer 2025 has been nothing if not the tipping point of the slow-burning streaming reckoning. More and more artists have pulled their music from Spotify (Hotline TNT, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, Deerhoof, and Godspeed You! Black Emperor, among others), citing everything from pitiful pay structures (fractions of cents funneled to everyone but the artist) to investments in AI military tech. It’s the largest Spotify exodus since 2022, when Neil Young and Joni Mitchell yanked their catalogs in protest of Spotify hosting Joe Rogan’s misinformation-spewing podcast. It’s been so effective, in fact, that Apple Music has even added features that help people transfer entire libraries, capitalizing on the growing cracks in Spotify’s dominance (and its tragic sound quality).

But beyond royalties and investments, Spotify has rewired how discovery itself works, flattening music into mood and metrics. In Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Cost of the Perfect Playlist, Liz Pelly breaks down Spotify’s failures into various categories: the wildly disproportionate pro rata payment system that punishes smaller artists; the data-driven recommendation machine designed to keep users on the app, regurgitating the same music regardless of packaging (there’s little to no difference between the songs that end up on a “radio” versus on a “playlist”); and the playlist economy that inhibits discovery while trying to define mainstream culture from the top down (remember when everyone realized Spotify was auto-playing “Good Luck, Babe!” and “Espresso” after every pop song last summer?).

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Playlists have become transactional ways of exploiting small artists rather than organic opportunities to hear new music. Placements on Lorem and Fresh Finds are dangled in front of independent acts, basically devolving into a form of digital payola. The artists aren’t the only ones sacrificing. Spotify is manufacturing and packaging a taste for you, the listener, rather than providing a means for you to do your own exploring. Rather than being built in, it’s something you actually have to set out to do or go against, no longer inherent to the medium/framework. Everyone’s tastes are boiled down into the same buzzwords, giving listeners a standardized “vibe” rather than risking to throw in something you didn’t already know you liked.

The last time I was in Los Angeles, I stopped by Record Safari in Los Feliz and walked out with, among a few other things, a $3 compilation CD titled Artist’s Choice: Joni Mitchell, Music that Matters to Her from 2005. It offers listeners “an hour with Joni Mitchell’s record collection,” with songs from Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Etta James, Bob Dylan, and other folk and jazz greats. Alongside the CD came a booklet of short blurbs from Mitchell about each of the tracks she’d selected. It felt like a playlist, but even more personal and tactile, breeding an inherently more active listening experience than putting a 100-song playlist on shuffle.

Mitchell dissected songs from her youth (“Clair de Lune” from her parents’ record collection, or hearing Edith Piaf’s “Les Trois Cloches” at a childhood birthday party), and pondered why Steely Dan’s Gaucho didn’t see the same success as Aja. She named “You Get What You Give” by the New Radicals as one of the first songs she’d heard in decades “that seemed to be inspired by something greater than personal ambition,” and throws a sly jab at ex Leonard Cohen (“Young girls take him seriously. I did. He seemed so worldly to me as a young woman. He gets funny as you get older”). It felt like the most personal window into her taste we’d gotten from Joni in years, and something I wouldn’t have even known existed without holding it in my hands. Listening to the record alongside her notes feels like a listening experience that breeds curiosity, rather than a streamer that rewards you for repeating more of the same (has anyone else felt like Spotify Wrapped has turned into a competition?).

If today’s playlists are engineered to maximize clicks and keep you in a listening loop, compilation CDs were the opposite. They were finite and curated, embodying a kind of guided discovery that was once serendipitous and culture-defining. You’d buy it for one or two songs, only to stumble upon artists you wouldn’t have sought out on your own (like when I was seven and bought Radio Disney Jams, Vol. 9 for Hannah Montana’s “If We Were a Movie” and heard Weezer’s “Beverly Hills” for the first time). Compilations offered a way of listening that was economically practical and culturally specific, focused on taking the opportunity to hear something new, making music an active hobby that’s been lost in today’s unstable, algorithm-driven streaming era.

Some comps are documents of mainstream monoculture, like Now That’s What I Call Music, the still-running series of quarterly hits that allows you to trace the arc of pop listening all the way back to 1983. Others spoke to brand identity: MTV’s Party to Go series captured the network’s dominance as a tastemaker in the ‘90s, while Starbucks churned out glossy mixes in the 2000s that aimed to bottle the chain’s atmosphere in jewel case form. Label comps like Drive-Thru Records’ Summer Samplers or Sub Pop 100 served as introductions to entire scenes and subcultures, and this very magazine used to include CD samplers inside its print editions. Beyond brands, there were comps that tied directly to real-life events—Q Magazine’s Glastonbury Essentials, or the Warped Tour samplers released at the start of every summer, found in Jansports and cargo shorts pockets everywhere. The common thread was trust in someone with cultural authority who shaped what you heard. Streaming shifts that trust to an opaque algorithm, stripping discovery of human fingerprints.

Many of these CDs were also free or dirt cheap, tucked into magazines, handed out at festivals, stacked by the register at your favorite store. It encouraged risk-taking in a way that $12/month streaming, supplemented by personal data and attention, doesn’t. Each one worked as an artifact; cultural moments condensed, sequenced, and sold for the price of an album. Greatest hits albums were crash courses, letting listeners buy into an artist’s catalog without committing to every LP. For bands with sprawling discographies, they served as affordable yet abundant starting points. And that’s where the irony comes in: today’s streaming world seems infinite but is anything but stable—AI songs flood the system while the algorithm locks you in a sonic echo chamber. Compilation CDs, by contrast, were finite but reliable. You knew what you had, and you could return to it again and again.

Compilation CDs’ stability directly translates to possibility, the guided chance encounter baked into the format in a way that algorithmic discovery engines can’t replicate. One Redditor put it squarely: “…If I find an artist I really like and they are on a compilation somewhere, I can usually find other music I like on it, if not some amazing hidden gems. They’re more useful to me than, say, looking up related artists on Spotify. There is usually an aesthetic link not made in most artist comparison algorithms.” Discovery in itself used to be a hobby—flipping through liner notes and scanning magazine blurbs. Streaming reframes it as labor the platform does for you, but the result feels hollow. Instead of steamrolling everything into the same endless loop of recommendations, compilations carved out specific tunnels and sonic rabbit holes for listeners to fall into. When the algorithm is so focused on you, the “new” things it offers can’t be that far out of left field. It keeps the echo chamber small, your taste neatly corralled under a certain umbrella. And that kind of hypertailored recommendation makes listening passive, something that happens to you, rather than an active exploration.

Unlike a mixtape (personal and intimate), or a playlist (infinite and disposable), comps struck a balance: authoritative curation with built-in surprise. The closest thing we’ve had to truly defining “compilation moments” was the Pop Danthology YouTube year-end mashups, Daniel Kim’s chaotic mixes that stitched together every hit song of the year into a single track. They’d drop on New Year’s Eve each year and became automatic communal listening; snapshots that compressed twelve months of pop into one hyperactive rush. Part of why they hit so hard is because people crave authoritative POVs—in this instance, something that tells you, definitively, what the year in music sounded like. It’s the same appetite that drives year-end lists, or the reason why people watch Fantano: the trust that someone else is doing the work of sifting through the chaos to offer you a map. Compilations scratched that itch in a way streaming never can (even when Spotify adds an “Editors’ Picks” tag, it still feels robotic and regurgitated, same jumble of songs.) Where algorithms individualize feeds into millions of slightly different variations, comps condensed culture into something everyone could point to, while also opening doors that wouldn’t have otherwise been walked through.

Comp CDs made discovery an unavoidable part of listening to music. Discovery wasn’t a feature, or a toggle, or an already-curated playlist. That was the point. Streaming promises to make discovery infinite, but what it really delivers is sparse: an endless loop of adjacent, sounds-like, looks-like, vibes-like suggestions. An algorithm can only ever serve you slight variations on what it already knows you like; it doesn’t risk, it doesn’t challenge, it doesn’t yank you sideways into something new. Infinite choice becomes a narrow lane, corralling everyone’s tastes through the same inputs and spitting out the same outputs that reward keeping your listening under a few adjacent umbrellas. The illusion of personalization only creates sameness, a monoculture wrapped in individual packaging. Comp CDs worked against that, giving you risks, curveballs, and hidden gems, and they did it with the authority listeners actually crave. They made curiosity a habit instead of a chore, and left you with discoveries that stuck. They proved that limits could spark more discovery than endless choice ever will.

Now That’s What I Call a Lost Art: The Case For Compilation CDs

Before algorithms flattened taste into vibes, compilations made discovery an active habit rather than a hollow promise.