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25 years of the Compact Disc

On October 1, 1982 Sony sold the very first CD player in Japan, along with Billy Joel’s 52nd Street – commercially launching a technology that would revolutionise the way in which the world listened to music.

The first disc had rolled off the production line at Dutch company Philips in August, but technology is generally given a birth-date relating to its first sale – so the true 25th anniversary is still a matter for discussion.

What is beyond doubt is that the CD swept across the globe, quickly competing with and then surpassing vinyl records as a new generation embraced the technology and started the now familiar process of updating their collections to a new format.

But for the collaboration between Philips and Sony, the compact disc might well have only allowed an hour of music, with the Japanese company famously forcing their Dutch counterparts to change their production facility in order to make a wider 80 minute disc.

Ostensibly, the reason for this was the decision that the whole of Beethoven’s 9th symphony should be able to fit on the disc, but several reports since have suggested that the true reason was to allow Sony to catch up with Philips’ quick adaptation of their factories to produce the format by forcing the change through.

The success had seemed a great distance from assured when Philips and Sony’s engineers were flying across the globe to collaborate on the joint-technology. Dutch engineer Kees Immink said in 1997: “Personally, I was not at all sure that CD would succeed, as I had seen the problems that arose with [another Philips product] Laservision.

“Naturally there were numerous occasions on which each team felt it had the best or most practical solution.”

Not that the arguments damaged either company – Sony, who had famously lost out in the format wars for videos with their Betamax tapes, had no problem marketing the CD to their audience, with the glittering discs becoming an instant hit.

It took less than four years for CD players to overtake record layers and by 1988 CDs were officially the best selling musical format, with vinyl in a terminal slump.

The CD’s success was not limited to music either. The computer and video game industry had grown in parallel with the CD, and with cartridges and tapes beginning to fall short of the data demands, the CD became a vital format for the likes of the PC and Sony’s PlayStation.

However, the CD’s 25th anniversary coincides with what could prove to be the beginning of its own demise, with digital downloads beginning to heavily impact on sales.

In the past decade CD sales have begun to slow drastically and digital downloads will account for a quarter of all worldwide music sales by 2010 according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI).

BPI Chief Executive Geoff Taylor said in July: "The UK recording industry has moved very quickly to expand beyond its traditional base of physical sales to generate additional revenues from multi-platform music licensing.

"CDs remain very attractive to consumers because of the flexibility and outstanding value for money they offer and for this reason they still represent the overwhelming majority of sales.

“Consumers vote with their pay packets and 58 million CD album sales in just six months is a very significant number indeed. Album units have dipped year on year, but we are still selling 32% more CDs than 10 years ago."

10 facts about the CD:

• The first album to sell a million copies was Dire Strait’s ‘Money for Nothing’ in 1985

• In 2000 global sales of CD albums peaked at 2.455 billion. In 2006 that figure was down to 1.755 billion.

• Philips insists that no one person can be credited as the inventor of the CD: “Nobody even invented one part of the technology alone. The CD was invented collectively by a large group of people working as a team.”

• Because the pits that make up the data are behind a plastic disc the presence of dust and small scratches does not affect playback because the laser that reads them focuses through them – in the same way as small scratches on a camera lens do not show up.

• Sony vice-president Norio Ohga, is credited as the man responsible for the discs being more than an hour in length.

• The final agreement over the technical specifications between Philips and Sony were recorded in the red book – so called after the favourite colour of the Philips project leader Joop Sinjou.

• The first CD that was pressed in Hanover was a recording of Herbert von Karajan conducting the Alpine Symphony by Richard Strauss.

• More than 200 billion CDs have been sold worldwide.

• Many of the first CD recordings were of classical music because this audience were believed to be more affluent and likely to adopt the technology.

• Sony’s portable CD player the Discman arrived in 1984, but it was the development of anti-skip technology that finally made the players more common in the 1990s.

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