[LINK] "The CD at 30 is feeling its age"

[rfmcdonald]

NPR's The Record notes that today is the 30th anniversary of the sale of the first compact disc (Billy Joel's 52nd Street as the first).

I'm intrigued by the thirty-year cycle for recording media that's identified here. As presented it sounds plausible, but the implication of the theory that digital downloads of mp3-format files will be dominant for the next three decades does make me wonder.

Today marks the 30th anniversary of a musical format many of us grew up with: the compact disc. It's been three decades since the first CD went on sale in Japan. The shiny discs came to dominate music industry sales, but their popularity has faded in the digital age they helped unleash. The CD is just the latest musical format to rise and fall in roughly the same 30-year cycle.

[. . .]

The CD was supposed to have the last word when it came to convenience and sound quality. And for a while, it did. The CD dominated record sales for more than two decades — from the late 1980s until just last year, when sales of digital tracks finally surpassed those of physical albums. It's a cycle that has played out many times in the history of the music industry, with remarkable consistency.

Sam Brylawski, the former head of the recorded sound division at the Library of Congress, says, "If you look at the last 110, 115 years, the major formats all have about 20 to 30 years of primacy."

He says one of the biggest factors driving this cycle is a desire on the part of manufacturers to sell new players every generation or so. "The real money — the real profits — for companies have been in the sales of hardware. That is to say, machines that play back recordings."

Brylawski says that's true for Apple's iPod, the must-have MP3 player that drove the demand for digital music tracks beginning in the early years of the 21st century. And it was just as true at the very beginning of music industry for one of the pioneers of sound recording: Thomas Edison.

"Edison put his heart and soul into this beautiful equipment," says Tim Brooks, who wrote a book about the beginnings of the recording industry called Lost Sounds. "He didn't care much who the singers were."

Edison practically gave his recordings away for free in order to get people to buy his phonographs. He invented the recording cylinder in 1877, but it didn't really catch on until the 1890s. Cylinders were about four inches long, and they looked like empty toilet paper rolls covered in wax or lacquer. They were the state-of-the-art musical format for about 20 years, until they were supplanted by a new invention: the 78 rpm disc, touted by Edison's competitor, the Victor Talking Machine Co.

"The early machines were very, very crude," says Brooks. "The sound was not as good as the sound on cylinders. But it was a lot more convenient. They didn't break as easily. They could be made longer, bigger, that sort of thing."

Convenience over sound quality — that's a theme we'll come back to later. The 78 reigned as the most popular format until the early 1950s, when it was replaced by the LP. The bigger disc definitely sounded better. But its success stemmed in part from how conveniently you could listen to a dozen songs on a single disc. The LP was in turn the format of choice for — you guessed it — roughly 30 years, until it was challenged by the cassette and finally supplanted by the CD. At each turn, of course, Brooks says the record industry was happy to repackage all of your old favorites in the new format.

"When 78s went out and LPs took over," says Brooks, "the record companies were able to resell stuff they'd sold before. When CDs replaced LPs and things in the 1990s, go back to the catalog and sell it again. So it's a cash cow for them that way."