Comment My experiences don't line up with this at all.... (Score 2) 329
I had a collection of somewhere slightly over 250-260 commercial music CDs (about half of which I sold off last year o various online web-sites who bought used CDs).
The sites doing the buying were extremely picky (to the point where they'd refuse to pay for a disc, even if it was the exact album they said they wanted, if its ISBN number didn't match the exact one they were after), and I was billed for replacement jewel cases in several instances, simply because the ones I provided with the CDs had small cracks in them.
Not a single disc I sold them was refused or returned for failure to play or for skipping though.
Meanwhile, I've had absolutely no issues playing any of the remaining discs in my collection. (I had to re-rip many of them just a few months ago, when I discovered a lot of the MP3 rips I made years earlier had some issues.)
What I can say, though, is, I've been very good about always putting my CDs back in the jewel cases whenever I finished playing one, and they all sit in a big, revolving CD storage tower in the house. I have to wonder if some of these complaints of "edge rot" and "bronzing" of the media and so forth are with discs people left sitting in hot cars in the summer, didn't put back in the cases often, etc. ?