While CD-R hardware support is widely available, the amount of CD-R discs burned has dropped severly. According to CDFreaks Burnstats, statistical data compiled by over 10 million burns, the share of CD-R recording has dropped to 2% of the total amount of discs burned, while in 2005 the statistics reported that the CD-R accounted for nearly 35% of all burns.

The CD-R was the first recordable optical storage format that became popular amongst consumers, by changing a layer of chemicals with a laser it was possible to burn pits and lands to a disc required to store digital data. With prices decreasing rapidly over the years, a CD burner became a standard device in every computer.

The DVD recordable is currently the dominate format with DVD burners now available from $30 or less and these burners are able to burn DVD recordables but also all support the CD-R, both playback and writing.

DVD recordables (DVD-R / DVD+R / DVD-RAM) account for 91% of the total, and the two DVD rewriteable formats (DVD-RW/DVD+RW) hold about 7% of the total amount of burns, in 2005 the DVD recordable and rewritable formats were responsible for about 60% of the total recordings.