The Compact Disc Turns 25

In June 1982, Sony Corporation demonstrated what it called the Digital Compact Disc at the Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago. The technical press ate it up. Player prices were high -- around $2,000 dollars for the early models -- and recordings on CDs were initially scarce. But as prices came down and titles became numerous, the CD gradually took market share from the dominant format, the cassette, and the venerable LP. Thus summer, the CD turned 25, but there was little to celebrate. Sales in the past few years have gone from bad to worse, as consumers make the transition to MP3s. As a BBC article on the CD anniversary points out, it is likely that the compact disc will survive for many years to come. It is still the preferred format for high fidelity listening, and the avilalbility of older and out-of-print titles from MP3 distributors is still quite limited.
But the CD is probably on its way out. In fact, its current status closely parallels the history of the LP at the time the CD first appeared. In the US at least, LP sales dominated for a fairly brief time. When the LP was introduced in the late 1940s, it quickly gained traction as compared to the 78-rpm disc. But the LP faced serious competition from another new format, the 45-rpm record. Recordings on open-reel tape, which were haltingly promoted at this time, achieved a tiny slice of the market. Ten years after the appearance of the LP the introduction of stereo discs created a messy situation for both consumers and producers, since record companies felt compelled to offer many titles in both stereo and mono versions. Record store owners balked at being forced to stock multiple formats, but tried to accomodate consumer buying patterns. That situation worsened in the late 1960s, when the 4-track and 8-track tapes were introduced, with the 8-track ultimately becoming the the "convenience" format of choice. Through the late 1970s, new formats continued to rise and fall. About the time the LP was seeing its 25th birthday, electronics manufacturers were pushing hard for the next "revolution" in home audio technology. With the tentative support of the major record labels, Japanese consumer electronics firms introduced quadraphonic LP players, but none of the mutually-incompatible quad formats ever had much success. The revolution would have to wait for something more compelling.
Meanwhile, competitors for the 45-rpm consumer (often teens or children by the 1960s) emerged in the form of the Playtape cartridge, which fared surprisingly well. The cassette's early customers were typically children or teens as well, and recorded cassettes slowly gained market share in the late 60s, first for users of battery operated portables and later as an in-car or home format.
By the early '80s, cassettes were the dominant format in the U.S., gaining more adult consumers and encroaching on market segments that the LP had maintained for decades. At the cassette's 25th birthday in 1989 (give or take a year or so depending on how you date the format's introduction) it was looking a bit long in the tooth, but the LP was positively decrepit at 40 years and counting. By this time, however, LP sales had dwindled to just a trickle; a measly number of classical discs were being pressed for hi-fi perfectionists, and a few ardently anti-CD artists were issuing titles on vinyl just to make a point.
CD sales meanwhile were ramping up, and the CD would put the prerecorded cassette to death within a few years. The revolution had finally come, and record sales blasted out of their late-80s doldrums. Through the '90s, while record sales waxed and waned, there was no serious competitor to the CD at all. Record companies and electronics manufacturers had apparently found the ultimate recording medium. All that started to unravel after about 1995, when the internet caught on in a big way. But downloading was a fundamentally different kind of "revolution in sound." The medium had disappeared -- not literally, because a hard drive, cd-rom, or memory chip was always in the mix somewhere-- but it had disappeared in the sense of it being the physical entity on which music was captured, transported to the consumer, and assembled into collections. With it were disappearing the need for record pressing factories, pure, black vinyl, massive record stores, the visual medium of "cover art," and the prideful display of a record collection.
Gone too (I think) is the constant turnover in recording media at intervals of a few decades. Future improvements in digital audio will not, most likely, result in consumers facing the prospect of abandoning their old recordings. If record companies act responsibly in the future, changes in the way music is delivered will be "backward compatible" with the current form of MP3, WAV, and other digital formats. So if history is the study of change over time, with the imminent death of the CD we reach the end of the history of sound recording technology. This site and others will record the changes of the past, but when downloading reaches its 25th anniversary, there may not be much on interest to say about it.

MORE SOURCES:
BBC: "Compact Disc Hits its 25th Birthday"
Wall Street Journal: "The CD Turns 25"