Sainsbury's ejects CDs and DVDs from its supermarket shelves

Sainsbury's ejects CDs and DVDs from its supermarket shelves
(Image credit: Multimediadiscount - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CD_DVD_Collections.jpg)

Sainsbury's is calling time on optical disc sales and will soon stop stocking CDs and DVDs on its supermarket shelves.

The retailer has already begun to phase out the shiny round media but will continue apace with records while the vinyl resurgence continues.

A spokesperson from Sainsbury's told the BBC that the decision has come due to the increasing popularity of streaming services among its customers for both music and films.

"Our customers increasingly go online for entertainment, so earlier this year we took the decision to gradually phase out the sale of DVDs and CDs so that we can dedicate extra space to food and popular products like clothing and homewares," they said.

There have been no similar announcements from other UK supermarket chains.

Profits from CD sales have already slipped behind vinyl in the US and are on course to do the same in the UK this year too, according to the British Phonographic Industry.

While this is, of course, a loss to hi-fi fans, CD sales still totalled £115m in 2020, which is far from inconsiderable. Even if that's not impressive enough for a shop with a range as wide as modern day supermarkets, there seems little danger that specialist music shops will follow suit any time soon.

It's arguably more of an issue for home cinema. Although unconfirmed, it seems likely that the ceasing of DVD sales will include Blu-ray and 4K Blu-ray discs too.

There are high-bitrate music streaming services that can match CDs but it's still far from a given that streaming video services will out-perform discs in terms of ultimate picture and sound. It's a good time to support your local independent music and video retailer...

MORE:

These are the best music streaming services: free streams to hi-res audio

And the best video streaming services

Maybe it's time to buy one of the best record players?

Or buck the trend and take a look at the best CD players you can buy

Dan Sung

Dan is a staff writer at What Hi-Fi? and his job is with product reviews as well as news, feature and advice articles too. He works across both the hi-fi and AV parts of the site and magazine and has a particular interest in home cinema. Dan joined What Hi-Fi? in 2019 and has worked in tech journalism for over a decade, writing for Tech Digest, Pocket-lint, MSN Tech and Wareable as well as freelancing for T3, Metro and the Independent. Dan has a keen interest in playing and watching football. He has also written about it for the Observer and FourFourTwo and ghost authored John Toshack's autobiography, Toshack's Way.

  • Terry Webb
    My streaming service keeps removing hard to find tracks from my playlists so I have to resort to tracking down the CD version on internet. Or another example, an album appears on a streaming service with some of the tracks unavailable. CDs still do the business as far as I'm concerned. You can't rely on streaming to do it all unless you're not very fussy about what you listen to.
    Reply