Unsung is a feature in which I take a look at a pop culture phenomenon (be it music, TV, literary, whatever) that has been forgotten or underappreciated. In this installment, I look at the compact disc and its rollercoaster ride from dominant music format to obsolescence.
A few weeks ago, I wrote in this space about the audio cassette and its interesting journey over the decades. Today I'm doing the same with the compact disc, which emerged in the early '80s and by the end of that decade was the dominant music format before MP3s came along.
Vinyl and cassettes were the big formats throughout the '60s and '70s, but in 1970, American inventor James T. Russell was granted a patent for the first system to record digital media on a photosensitive plate. Sony and Philips both developed prototypes in the late '70s for a disc that is read using a laser. The LaserDisc was introduced in 1978 by Philips, Pioneer and movie studio MCA under the amazing name DiscoVision for movies and other video presentations like concert recordings; somehow, DiscoVision didn't stick as a name but LaserDisc did. The discs themselves were the size of 12-inch vinyl records and offered superior video quality, but the VHS, which was introduced two years earlier, was the video format that caught on with consumers. It was less expensive and the videocassette recorder (VCR) made it easy to record TV programs.
Meanwhile, Sony and Phillips designed a new digital audio disc using the LaserDisc technology. The compact disc was introduced in 1982 and was marketed as the height of audio for consumers who wanted a better listening experience than the record or cassette could offer. It was also much smaller than a record and initially touted as resistant to scratches or breaking, although both of those were false claims
It took a few years to catch on. When I got to college in the fall of 1985, most of us were still listening to records and/or cassettes. My RA still had an 8-track player in his room. But my friend Rob was the first person I knew to have a CD player. And he remained the only one all the way through college.
I was hesitant to start buying another format that required another player, so I stuck with buying new vinyl and taping them onto cassettes for the time being.
But CDs were definitely making headway. I remember a lot of noise in 1987 when the Beatles began reissuing their albums on CD with remastered audio. People started to replace albums they already owned with CDs. When I graduated from college in 1989, my dad gave me my first CD player as well as some huge-ass speakers to go with them. The first CDs I bought were appropriately random: Joe Jackson's I'm the Man, The Cult's Sonic Temple and the soundtrack to the Who's The Kids Are Alright.
I was still buying vinyl, but I could see that CDs were starting to take over. I had been using my dad's old turntable to that point, but I decided to get a new one while they were still around and affordable.
CDs were still more expensive than the other formats at that point, so I would look for sales. I had started working in Peabody, Mass., after graduation and there was a little video store that also sold CDs for $8 a pop, so I would pick up stuff there. And the now-defunct department store Lechmere would also have good deals. In 1990, I discovered stores like Rockit Records in Saugus and the Record Exchange in Salem that would sell used CDs for cheaper prices; they were also good places to find hard-to-find promo discs and imports that radio DJs would unload.
Eventually, I just started buying only CDs. Although the cars I drove still only had cassette decks, so I would continue my habit of taping albums for use in the car and in a Walkman. Sony developed a portable CD player called the Discman in 1984, although it didn't really catch on in the U.S. until the '90s; with a cassette converter, you could use the Discman in the car. Another development was the advent of the CD burner, which allowed you to duplicate CDs or make mixes using blank CD-Rs.
The CD had a stronghold on music media sales throughout the '90s until the emergence of MP3 file sharing in 1999, when Napster and other peer-to-peer service sprung up on the internet and allowed music fans to share (or steal, depending on your point of view) vast amounts of music from like-minded folks who had figured out how to rip the songs from their CDs into MP3 files. Sure, the audio quality was often shitty (or at least not as good as CDs) and the files were often mislabeled, but it introduced an entire generation (since a lot of Napster users were often college campuses, where they could take advantage of high-speed internet to enable faster downloading) to the joys of not paying for music. The record labels sued and eventually got Napster and its ilk shut down, but by the time this happened, the digital genie was out of the bottle. Sales of recorded music (mostly CDs) dropped by 50% from 1999 to 2009. Apple introduced the iTunes store and the iPod in the early '00s as a way to get music fans enthused about legal MP3s, but that didn't help CD sales.
But the real death knell for the CD came via audio streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music, which allowed users to access to a huge catalog of music using their phone wherever and whenever they wanted, thanks to the prevalence of high-speed internet and Wifi. Vinyl has made a comeback with hipsters and fans of huge artists like Taylor Swift and Adele, who offer special vinyl editions of their albums with bonus tracks. You can still find CDs at music stores, but the selection is much smaller than it used to be.
CD players are also pretty scarce. When I was putting together an old-school component stereo system for my daughter Lily a few years ago, the CD player I bought her was a $30 DVD player that also plays CDs (I had to ask a clerk at Best Buy to find me one; it was located in a tiny corner of the store and barely noticeable). And the CD player I use is an old 5-disc DVD player that we used to have in our living room.
One thing that has diminished since CDs declined in popularity was the album. The CD was the last dominant album format; indeed, there are certain albums that only make sense on CD (see Steven Hyden's great post on this topic). There are more albums released than ever thanks to the ease of the internet, but many music fans rarely listen to albums in their entirety now. Streaming allows them to pick and choose their favorite songs and skip or ignore the ones they don't like or care about. It's so easy to make playlists that you can only hear the songs you want to hear at any given time.
As I mentioned in the cassette post, I primarily listen to music on MP3 because I use them to put together my weekly radio show. I'll still occasionally buy vinyl, but rarely anything new since those tend to be overpriced. It's the same with CDs. I'll usually only get them if I'm in a record store with a good used CD section and I find something I don't have for under $10. I've also revisited something I was doing several years, which is going to my local library to borrow CDs I don't have. You can also find cheap CDs on Amazon.
When we have long road trips in the car, I'll often break out a selection of CDs for the ride. I still have just about all the CDs I've purchased over the years, so it can be fun to revisit things I haven't listened to in a long time. The CD wasn't perfect, but it has gotten a bum rap over the years. There's also something to having physical media that won't disappear at the whim of a record company or studio conglomerate.
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