Rise and Fall of the CD

On the afternoon of October 1, 1982, Sony introduced a new home stereo gizmo… it was the world’s first compact disc player… they called it the CDP-101…

Weird name, but if you take it apart, it makes sense…”CDP” stands for “compact disc player…and “101” is binary notation for the number 5…that’s because the head of the audio division considered this first model to be in the middle of Sony’s future lineup of cd players…so “5” on a scale of one to ten, I guess…

Sony had been working on compact disc technology with a Dutch company called Philips for a number of years, which released their own machine, the cd100, about a month later…

Compact disc technology was rolled out worldwide in march 1983…and for the next seventeen years, the recorded music industry experienced a boom unlike it had ever seen before…music fans were convinced to buy all their favourite albums again…and as the popularity of vinyl and cassettes waned, the cd became the currency of the realm…

And lo, it was good…insane amounts of money were made year after year after year…

But nothing lasts forever and in about 2000, the bloom started to come off the cd rose…and now, cd sales are in a total free-fall as streaming becomes the way most people access music…

The compact disc isn’t dead yet, but it’s never going to be the juggernaut it once was…what happened?...and how?...it’s actually a fascinating story…

This is the rise and fall of the CD…