The awful truth about CDs, do they have the same shelve life as LP's ?

The main difference between LP and CD longevity to me, is that damaged or worn LP cannot be repaired, while less than perfect CD can be recovered/renewed by ripping software and recorded onto CD-R.
Longevity of CD-R depends on the photosensitive dye used. Taiyo Yuden CD-Rs have 100 years warranty. It is also possible to make backup of CDs on HD. Backup for LPs is not possible.

Have you tried to rip them?  Perhaps it is possible to recover them.
Sometimes the issue is the sun shinning on particular place on CD rack.  

Hard drives fail fast (in comparison) and the new solid state drives are no better and some worse than the spinning platter.

Backup drives, that are not in use (unpowered), almost never fail. I keep two backups (drives are cheap), in addition to main music drive, just in case of something bad happening during updates (second backup in different location in case of fire, theft, etc). The chance of failure of two unpowered drives in storage is pretty much zero. As for the SSD - the main problem is limited number of writes to each sector - completely unimportant in this application. Again - unpowered drives don’t likely fail.

jeffstar, if your gear is directed/optimized toward vinyl then most likely you don't even have D/A converter, much less A/D.  In addition nobody would spend money to buy decent A/D converter to digitize all their LPs predicting ahead of time that some might get damaged.  Even if you can copy the music from LP you cannot copy LP itself and many people will tell you that it is not the same.  On the other hand you can even renew scratched CDs by ripping and copying them to CD-Rs - giving them new life.  I have all my CDs on hard drive (+2 backups) and will never loose them.  As for Mr. McGowan - his claims are on the verge of being funny and if he claims that commercial CDs have dye he is uniformed at best.  Enthusiastic uninformed, I agree.

How many people do you know that have A/D converters, just in case?