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A few months ago, I went to dig up some of my early music-making efforts (burned to CD-R in 1999), only to find out they were unreadable. It turns out at least 10% of my "old CD pile" is already dead or damaged. The ones with stick-on labels are especially difficult to read.

That's way before cheap bulk CD-Rs and fast (and equally cheap) 16x burners appeared though.

I had some home burned CDs that where 6 or so years old and had hole in them.

I have a bunch of late-20th century CD-Rs; and actually the cheapest ones are those that still work; all the gold-plated, branded CD-Rs (Kodak, etc) are mostly unreadable.

I'd imagine it also depends on how you store them and what climate you live in.