A small, rainbow-reflective, digital audio disc, now standardized at 4½ inches, on to which sound is recorded as a series of metallic pits enclosed in PVC and read by an optical laser. A related format is the compact videodisc, which has the facility to play both pictures and sound. Phillips began work on the compact disc in 1969, but it was only in the mid-1980s that CD began to usurp vinyl as the preferred format for recorded sound. The first million-selling CD came in 1986 with Dire Straits’s Brothers In Arms. By 1992 CD sales stood at 1.115 billion, with sales of pre-recorded cassettes at 1.55 billion, vinyl albums at 130 million and singles at 330 million. By the mid-1990s the CD single had also largely replaced the old vinyl 45 r.p.m. single as the preferred form for single releases and had helped revitalize the format; thus, in 1997, UK single sales were the highest since 1983. CD allows for a longer listening time than vinyl and arguably possesses a clearer, cleaner and superior sound. However, its size means that it struggles to compete with vinyl in terms of packaging or sleeve design, and detractors claim that this makes the format inferior. Critics have also claimed that CDs have traditionally been overpriced, despite their longer playing times.
The rise of CD technology has had two important effects on audiences for popular music. First, it has created an older market for pop and indeed has attracted disaffected music lovers back as consumers as audiences replace their old vinyl records with CD reissues, and many established pop stars from the 1960s have consequently had their careers prolonged. Second, the CD’s success has paradoxically created a cult among admirers of the vinyl disc, and vinyl sales are a small, but not insignificant part of the market for popular music. By the late 1990s, however, there was considerable debate around the CD’s future as a format. Developments such as that of affordable recordable CDs for home consumption and of near CD-quality music that could be downloaded from the Internet (the idea of ‘audio on demand’ exclusively through the Internet, thus bypassing CD) began to cast a certain doubt over recorded CDs’ hegemonic position.
DAVID BUCKLEY