The CD Emoji 💿

For anyone who loves my series about retro emojis as much as I do, I have good news. I plan on featuring so many more and make this series even more nostalgic.

Here they are:

• the telly 📺 ,
• the floppy disk 💾,
• the DVD 📀,
• and the CD-ROM 💽.

To be honest, I think it's odd that there are so many optical disc emojis. Who in the emoji community actually cares to differentiate between the three? But yeah, you gotta be precise. If you mention the old Age of Empires PC game to an old friend, be sure to stick to the proper emoji terminology. God forbid if you weren't!

When I think of the original CD emoji though, I think of this beautiful time of the early 2000s when I became a music collector. With a dad that owns over 7300 LPs and 4400 CDs, you have to start somewhere (PS: where's the LP emoji, Unicode?)

The first CD I ever bought with my own money must have been the Marshall Mathers LP by Eminem. Of course, I was a big fan of his music. He opened up the world of rap music to me, which was part of my collector's journey for at least a decade.

The 2001 debut album of the Gorillaz was also amongst the first CDs I owned. Everyone loved Clint Eastwood, 19-2000 or Rock the House. But if your taste for the band was more matured, Tomorrow Comes Today was the shit. I love this album to this day and re-listen to it every once in a while (also while writing this post).

Closely linked to the purchase of CDs was of course ripping them and burning your own, which is exactly what I did. When on the go, I listened to my favourite albums and self-burned CDs on my Discman (the natural evolution of the Walkman), which was anything but a portable device. Trust me when I tell you that it didn't exactly fit into the pockets of an 11-year-old. Also, the occasional shake when I rode the bus to school made the CD jump and my music stop. So the "shock protection" that my Discman so proudly advertised, didn't really do what it was supposed to do. But that was the price you had to pay if you wanted to listen to your music on the go and feel like a really cool kid.

The age of the MP3 player wasn't too far away and when it finally came, I was ready. After all, I had ripped every CD I had bought and combined with the music I downloaded from popular file-sharing services (debatably illegal) I had a collection of a couple of hundred MP3s.

The MP3 player changed the game and the way I consumed music forever. I stopped burning CDs. I stopped creating mixtapes for my friends. There was still the occasional exchange of MP3s via USB stick, but that was far less romantic than handing your mate a self-burned CD with a printed inlet of the track listing (and sometimes even a cover inlet). At least the device was more portable! But if there was a way to get a hold of my old, blue, clunky Sony Discman, I would probably spend hours listening to my old CD collection which is hidden away somewhere in the basement of my brother and be overwhelmed with feelings of nostalgic bliss.

Even though my CD journey ended back then, I'm far from being done talking about retro emojis. In the optical disc era alone, we still have to discuss CD-ROMs and DVDs. And that's what I love about retro emojis and their inclusion to the Unicode standard. They take me back to better days. To childhood days. To simpler days. To the nineties and early two thousands.

Never forget.