Disclaimer, I'm not Gen Z. I've been collecting CDs longer than Gen Z has existed. I'm just really excited for all of you discovering the benefits of physical media.

You can have your cake and eat it too by buying physical media (preferably as directly from the artists as possible), ripping, and self-hosting (Plex, Jellyfin, etc.). I just stopped in to add my new personal favorite kind of physical media collecting, buying vinyl (especially the fancy fun colored stuff or great album art) along with the FLAC digital download. Now I can buy the cool art thing (for that nostalgic playing experience too, not just dead collection weight), get the quality audio in my ears (faster than the physical media can be shipped), and I'm not adding to my overweight CD collection. The multigenerational vinyl collection I now maintain is another matter. I use bandcamp mostly for this, but there are other options out there.

Also, don't be afraid to scour the thrift stores for CDs too. Just make sure to open the cases to check for damage (and verify the correct CD inside). One can usually recover a slightly scratched CD, but if you ever see light straight through the metal layer then pass. I've personally seen loads of great stuff from the last millennium in pretty good condition as other people dump their physical collections in favor of streaming. CDs are now what vinyl was to us olds 20 years ago. Their loss is your gain.

As a bonus, if you're into retro gaming, you can usually find a few PlayStation (One) games and late 90s PC games mixed in with these collections because they all used the same sized cases as music CDs back then. Some of those software and PS1 CDs may also have the audio encoded as regular CD tracks rather than audio files in the data session.

Well I do not collect anything because I am broke. But I had some old stuff (pirated cds from ye olde days before streaming was mainstream), and suggest to rip the cd contents to some modern storage (portable ssd or hard disk, or some other kind of storage), mostly because that way they do not take physical space (you can give the cd away to someone who may find it useful), and digital copy can have multiple backups and less likely to age poorly (think cd getting read errors as more scratches forms from usage).

Over the last couple years I have started collecting them and it's been nice. Mostly 90s stuff for me since I fell down the rabbit hole of 90s music.

Also, as much as I like bonus content on CDs and DVDs, I hate how I cannot get the bonus content to even work on one of my CDs because it's one of those CD-ROM interactive formats. Pretty sure it has the animated CG music videos for most of the songs, maybe. I can't say for sure because I can't figure out how to get it to work for anything other than playing the music.

This is making me wax nostalgic for an old game called Monster Rancher. It was on the first Playstation, and you could generate monsters for your farm by popping in any CD and the game would generate a monster based off whatever it read on the disk. My friends and I would scour their Dad's several tall CD racks in hopes to find a rare monster.

But back to CDs, Meteora was a great album. I had it as well. Their Reanimation album, a remix album, got me through a tough time in my life when I was living in a shelter for awhile as a kid while waiting to be placed in the foster system. All that said, pretty sure Hybrid Theory was the album most people propped up. It's all good in my book, though. The music video for Meteora's "Breaking The Habit," is still one of my favorite MVs.

Sadly, I only have a couple CDs left these days. One is Green Day's American Idiot and another is an album a personal friend put out locally.