The compact disc was the go-to format for many music followers for many years. Launched in 1982, it rose to dominance in 1988 when it overtook vinyl gross sales for the primary time.
From there, CD was king for over a decade, persevering with its dominance close to undisputed till 2002, after we first noticed streaming companies begin to nip at its lead. Even then, it took many extra years for streaming to say the highest spot, with the Recording Trade Affiliation of America (RIAA) reporting that Spotify and co. didn’t dethrone CDs as music’s prime vendor till 2014.
Wanting again, a key motive for CD’s development got here in 1985 when Dire Straits launched their album Brothers In Arms. It was the primary CD to interrupt a million gross sales,and a key album that opened listeners as much as the advantages of CDs.
At a technical degree, CD was the primary mass-market audio format to seize an entire album’s value of music with out the necessity for A and B sides. On common, a CD can take 74 minutes of music, whereas one aspect of a vinyl file can retailer solely round 20 minutes’ value. CD gamers had been additionally a lot simpler to make use of, making them extra alluring for basic music followers.
There was additionally the benefit over vinyl data’ delicate nature, and having to ensure to get issues together with monitoring power and RPM proper. For those who didn’t, you risked getting poor high quality copy, jumpy playback, and even probably damaging your LP. With a CD you simply plonk the disc in your participant and press ‘Play’.
On prime of that, the newer format introduced easy quality-of-life enhancements, together with having the ability to skip tracks with the push of a button and – from 1993, when recordable-CD expertise grew to become cheaper and extra extensively out there – the flexibility to ‘burn’ your individual CDs and make ‘combine tapes’ of your favorite songs.
That’s to not point out the sonic enhancements, with CDs introducing digital recording and providing a wider potential dynamic vary than rival codecs. In truth the standard stays stable, however not top-tier, to this present day.
For those who’re listening to music on a streaming service resembling Spotify, you’re getting decrease than CD high quality. Which is why Neil Younger famously mentioned listening to music on the service means you’re solely listening to “half” of what he recorded.
So why didn’t CDs’ reign as the highest format final whether it is in some ways higher than Spotify? And why hasn’t it loved the identical resurgence as vinyl in recent times?
On the latter query, for people who missed it, vinyl gross sales have been on the up for years. CD gross sales have been typically in decline or flat by comparability. This was very true in 2024 when, in response to the Digital Leisure and Retail Affiliation (ERA), vinyl gross sales grew by 10.5 per cent, with 6.7 million data offered within the UK. A flat 10.5 million albums had been purchased on CD throughout the identical interval.
Answering why CD isn’t rising like vinyl is hard, particularly amongst audiophiles. At a high quality degree, many hi-fi lovers argue that vinyl’s analogue nature provides it a heat and added “authenticity” that CDs can’t match. So the talk about which is best remains to be very a lot raging.
At a sensible degree, most of the file store homeowners and followers we converse to are additionally fast to focus on the intangible advantages vinyl brings as a motive for its renewed recognition. These embrace the group at file outlets, a lot of which double as stylish bars and low joints nowadays, and special-edition treats resembling customized paintings and bundled pullouts. This makes a whole lot of sense contemplating fashionable artists’ renewed curiosity in vinyl.
For those who take a look at gross sales numbers it’s really new artists promoting special-edition vinyl variations of their albums with these extras which are drawing essentially the most consideration. Taylor Swift, Chappel Roan, Sabrina Carpenter and Fontaines DC account for 4 out of the 5 best-selling data from 2024, in response to the Official Charts Firm/BPI.
The one ‘older’ band to make it in was Oasis, who had a spike in gross sales of their 1994 album Positively Possibly. And that’s a far cry from the standard previous guard – Fleetwood Mac, Pink Floyd and many others – who dominated vinyl gross sales only a decade in the past. This factors to causes past pure audio high quality and ease of use as a driving power for vinyl’s development. Possibly it’s individuals eager to personal the music, fairly than simply stream it. Possibly it’s pure fandom.
No matter it’s, we all know it’s not audio high quality, which is one in every of CD’s solely actually robust benefits over Spotify streaming within the present world. For followers of bodily media, if it was, then SACD – Sony and Philips’s short-lived try within the Nineteen Nineties to interchange the CD with one thing even higher – would now be the world’s main bodily media. Conversely, Apple Music, Amazon Music, Tidal or Quobuz, which all supply higher-than-CD high quality streams, could be dominating streaming, not Spotify.
Whatever the reply, the CD remains to be wholesome, and the truth that gross sales are holding regular is an achievement in itself, contemplating the dire straits it was in a decade in the past when gross sales had been plummeting year-on-year. This, plus artists’ willingness to proceed releasing music on CD, together with particular editions, for followers of the format, means that CDs gained’t be going away any time quickly.
