Russell, believe it or not, many scratched CDs still work fine. my friend dropped an Eminem CD he had into the radiator, when they got it out it was full of scratches, but remarkably played fine.
you can burn mp3's onto a CD, but instead of making it a music CD, u can make it a data CD. this way you can fit over 100 songs on 1 CD, and some types of CD players can still read it.