Science & Tech Quote by Rick Danko

“When CD technology first came out, it was just so much waste” lands less like a tech critique and more like an exhausted shrug from someone who watched “progress” arrive as a pile of plastic.

Rick Danko isn’t talking as a policy guy or an audiophile blogger. He’s talking as a working musician who lived through formats as mandates: vinyl to tape to CD, each shift sold as cleaner, better, inevitable. The sting is in “first came out” and “just so much” - not a nuanced lifecycle assessment, a gut-level memory of an industry stampede. Early CDs meant re-buy campaigns, hasty remasters, packaging bloat, and perfectly playable collections suddenly treated as obsolete. “Waste” names the collateral damage: not only materials, but money, time, and the erasure of older listening rituals.

There’s also a quiet indictment of how the music business monetizes change. New format launches create artificial urgency and a fresh reason to charge full price for the same songs. For artists like Danko, who came up when records were objects with weight and artwork and wear, the CD era could feel like the beginning of frictionless consumption - convenience replacing intimacy, durability replacing patina, the “upgrade” replacing the relationship.

The line works because it’s plainspoken and unsentimental. It refuses nostalgia as a pose; it’s nostalgia as a ledger. In a single sentence, Danko frames technological novelty not as liberation but as churn - the kind that keeps markets moving and leaves everyone else holding the trash bag.