If there is one device that had a strong hold on the music and audio business for the longest time, it would have to be the compact disc. Otherwise known as the CD. These little discs once took the world by storm and became THE way to listen to music, but have since fallen irrelevant. Let's talk about their history.
Before CD's became the standard for listening to audio such as music, cassette tapes were the defined way to do so. They were very much portable and easy to walk around with. Especially if you had a Sony Walkmen and a pair of headphones, as that was the typical way one listened to mesic on the go. Remember that scene at the beginning of Guardians of the Galaxy where Chris Pratt was dancing around the alien planet listening to Redbone's Come and Get Your Love? Well, he was using a Walkman while doing it!
Going into the beginning of the CD, Inventor James Russel was the first to officially work on the project. He started off in his garage by creating many different forms for digital music to play. His goal was to was to make some trendy version of vinyl. He wasn't the only one with the ice though. Countries very into technology such as Japan has similar plans This would eventually get the attention of companies like Sony and Phillips to stop the productions of the Walkmen and Cassette album. These companies would market a thin 5 inch wide disc that would play music given the same technology that Thomas Edison made with the phonograph 100 years ago. They decided to make it out of a laser encoded disc, made from the same material as bullet proof glass, these are made to last about more 100 years.
They started off experimenting with only a couple of albums to see how they would do, such as Billy Joel's “52nd Street" and Bruce Springstein's "Born in the USA" these took off immediately, as audiophiles would practically throw away all of the vinyl and cassette tapes to get their music on the all new CD! In only a few years, CD sales would overshadow vinyl sales and left the cassette business in the
Around 1982, Sony launched its CDP-101. The first commercialized CD player in 1982. It was first offered by an electronics company in Japan, they accepted, and the CD player made it to the U.S. around 1983 for the prices around $1000. Now imagine how much a CD player would go for now, given you can still find one at BestBuy. It's like when Apple released the first iPhone for a lot of money and they would inevitably get a little cheap as the technology advanced!
CD's started being made in large factories. They began to make a lot of money and sold worldwide. Many bands and cover artists started using them to record and sell their music to masses worldwide.
The next step companies like Sony and Phillips took was around the late ’90s when they first discovered the CD-R (Compact Disc Recordable). Developed in 1988, the CD-R took flight when PCs and digital recorders began allowing consumers to “rip” discs, preserving the music in low bit-rate files to later be recorded onto CD-Rs to share. It was a slow process to download music, but it was only the beginning of the next big trend that would change the audio business forever, Digital Music.
In fact later on, the CD-RW would overtake the CD-R, where the difference with this one is that it could download music somewhat faster and could store a lot more music! From there you could start to share your digital music with your friends and family. You could start to download album, albeit which will cost money, but as the digital music game increased, the prices for the individual music started to decrease.
Around 2000, the new millenium caused a new enemy for CD's. It's as if all their development with digital music opened up a Pandora's box for CD's. Known as Pandora. That and Napster introduced the world to streaming music online and giving us "internet radio. This type of way to upload and download music started a new wave of listing to music. People became obsessed with this type of way to listen to music and it would become the next big thing. From there, it all went downhill.
Then came computer company Apple's new invention, the iPod. It was told to be this small rectangular touch screen device that could hold thousands upon thousands of songs on. What CD sales once did to Cassette sales, now iTunes sales was now doing to CD sales.
Around the 2010s, more streaming services started to take off even more. the idea that pandora set up with "internet radio service" is what is today's biggest tred, and what one could argue the biggest competitor in the game being Spotify. While still offering fees to join, Spotify is the hottest way to not only stream music but to create your own playlists and will use technology to suggest similar songs to the ones you already listen to.
Now, CD's have practically come obsolete. You may still have some relatives you have copies of Greatful Dead or Phis. (I know I have some who do) but most places have officially stopped making them. However, it's not uncommon for old things to come back into style. Vinyl is still pretty popular at the moment for old fashioned listening on record players, movies like Guardians of the Galaxy got people to see cassettes and Walkmans back in a new light, and hey the 80s and now 90s are coming back to the mainstream in pop culture, so at any point CD's could come back into how we listen to music. And maybe a day will come where another new form of technology will overtake streaming. Who knows! for now, the CDs will go down in music history as what took the music world by storm, even if every storm will eventually end.
Sources:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/47441962
https://www.digitaltrends.com/features/the-history-of-the-cds-rise-and-fall/
https://www.britannica.com/technology/compact-disc
https://www.philips.com/a-w/research/technologies/cd/beginning.html
No comments:
Post a Comment