Rise of the CD

of consumer media, stuff like wax cylinders. By earliest days, I mean like media you could play back and experience, not stuff like sheet music or or written plays or things like that. And we're gonna be leading all the way up to today's streaming formats in this series. And in our last episode, I covered the birth of the video cassette, and I talked about the very early days of the compact disc. But I want to folk it's

more on CDs in this episode because they are very important. Uh. They played a big part in sort of the transformation of music. So in order for us to understand the era of digital files and then eventually the the migration to streaming services, we have to understand more about c d s. And I talked a bit about the development of the c D standard, the compact disc standard, and the format of the compact disc in that last episode, and how the Audio CD debuted on the market way

back in n two. But I should give a bit more background on some of those standards. I mentioned that the alleged reason that compact discs measure twelve centimeters in diameter is because an executive at Sony felt a single compact disc should be able to fit a full recording of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony on it. Sony had partnered with the company Phillips on developing this compact disc standard, and Phillips owned a subsidiary, uh and it was PolyGram Records.

So PolyGram Records is music label. And the longest recording of Beethoven's Ninth that was in PolyGram's catalog was seventy four minutes long. So to fit seventy four minutes of audio on a compact disc using the standards they had arrived at would require a disc of at least twelve centimeters in diameter. Now again I said the beginning of all that allegedly because sometimes these things just turn out to be legends and not actually true, And I honestly

don't know if that legend is true or not. It may well be. I hope it is. It's kind of a cool little way of saying that's why c d s are the size that they are. Now, it wasn't just music that determined that size, right, It wasn't just the fact that Beethoven's Symphony is seventy four minutes, because why did seventy four minutes take up that much space as opposed to less space or more space? Well, the sample rate and the bit encoding played a big part

in that. So sample rate refers to how many times you measure something, how many measurements you're taking per unit of time, And in this case with audio, uh, we're talking about measuring some sort of level of audio energy per unit of time. Frequency is typically what we're talking about. So the more times you sample audio per second, the closer the recording will resemble the original audio, And each sample has a certain amount of data associated with it.

The more samples you take per second, the more data you're going to have to represent whatever it is that you've measured. So with audio CDs, Sony and Phillips decide on a sample rate of forty four point one killer hurts. That's forty four thousand, one hundred samples per second. So why forty four point one killer hurts? Why arrive at that number? Was it arbitrary? Well, and now it has

to do with something called the Nyquist rate. So Harry Nyquist was an electric electronic engineer and he studied signal processing, and his work was what prompted the adoption of the term niquist rate and niquist limit um. So this explains a phenomena. It says that for any finite bandwidth signal, you need to sample the signal at twice the frequency range of that signal in order to capture all of the information represented within it. So if a signals frequency,

let's don't worry about audio. Just say that you've got some sort of signal, and you say you've got a frequency that ranges from ten killer hurts to sixty killer hurts. The full range of frequencies there is fifty kill hurts right ten to sixty that's a fifty killer hurts range. To sample that bandwidth and to get all the information that is associated with that signal so that you're you're not losing anything, you would need a sample rate of

at least one hundred killer hurts. That's twice the frequency range. The range was fifty, you double that. That's a hunry killer hurts. That's your niquist rate. But how do you come up with a single standard sampling rate for all audio recording? After all, a complex, nuanced piece of music there has a lot of very low pitch, very high pitch music in it could have a much greater range of frequencies than a simple pop song. And that's not me putting down pop music. I happen to love pop music.

But how do you apply one set of rules to all music? Well, Sony and Phillips engineers agreed on forty four point one killer hurts because we generally say that the range of human hearing goes from twenty hurts to twenty killer hurts. So, in other words, any sounds that have a frequency below twenty hurts are too low pitch for us to hear, and any sounds with a frequency higher than twenty killer hurts are too high pit for

us to hear. So a CDs sample rate is forty four point one killer hurts to be able to capture all the perceptible information in an audio piece with a little bit of wiggle room. But that's just part of the picture. Sure, we're measuring audio at forty four thousand, one times per second. But another thing we have to think about is how detailed are we getting with those measurements.

Sony and Phillips decided on a sixteen bit audio bit depth that gives us sixty five thousand, five hundred thirty six possible ways to describe the audio energy in a sound file. So, in other words, you have that many degrees to describe the sound in in terms of its frequency. And uh, obviously the more degrees you have, the more precise you can be with that measurement. So it's pretty precise. It's it's not you know, it's not flawless, but it's

pretty precise. Now, if we do a bit of math, we see that the bit rate or amount of information we need to describe the audio ends up being one point three five megabits per second. Now that's megabits, not megabytes. Remember, a bit is a single unit of information. It's either a zero or a one, whereas a byte is a collection of eight bits. Okay, so one point three five megabits per second is what we get for sixteen bit audio sampled at forty four point one killer hurts or

Cede equality. That means a minute of stereo audio ends up being about ten megabytes of information storage space. So the amount of data per second, coupled with the total storage time is what dictated the CD form factor. Also, these were standards for consumer compact discs and compact displayers. In the professional audio world, the sampling rate for recording and duplicating tends to be forty eight killer hurts or higher, and that generates way more data per second than the

lower sampling rates. But that was for the professional processing as opposed to consumer grade c d s and CD players. Also, this is a really good reminder that digital formats are inherently different from analog formats. In analog, you don't slice up the audio energy levels like you do with digital. It's sort of a seamless experience, at least to human perception.

It's seamless. So with digital, you're taking what seems to be a smooth, unbroken sound, and effectively you're chopping it up and describing it at each instance for a certain number of instances per second. In this case, but these sections are so small that to us, to our perception, it doesn't really sound chopped up at all, at least if if you're doing the whole thing correctly, it doesn't

sound chopped up. Still, this approach meant that audio files who swear by vinyl would often reject the very concept of digital music. There are those who argue that because CDs have a sample rate at all means they cannot

possible capture all the information of an audio performance. And while you might say that the sounds not captured might be outside the range of human hearing, they might somehow shape other sounds in the recording in ways that aren't replicable in digital formats and only happen as we actively

listen to analog music. So the sounds we can't hear might affect sounds we do hear, But if those are never captured on digital recording, if they are blocked from being recorded, then we'll be hearing something we weren't meant to hear. On top of that, if there are frequencies that are greater than the niquist rate, those frequencies are attenuated and end up being at a lower frequency than

they should, which is called aliasing. Aliasing is a real problem, and so to address that, engineers designed analog to digital converters or A d c s, and they incorporate a low pass filter. The ideas the filter kind of acts like a bouncer at a nightclub. If a frequency in an analog audio source would be higher than twenty two point oh five killer hurts, which is the niquist limit for c d s. Since it's half the niquist rate of forty four point one killer hurts, then the filter

doesn't let that frequency through the converter. It says, sorry, sorry, you're too high pitched, we're not laying you in. That information uh never makes it to the recording. In other words, it gets blocked. Now, if the A d C is well designed and really well implemented, the recorded audio shouldn't really be affected in that case. But early A d c s were a bit primitive and sometimes they could degrade audio quality, giving music lovers ammunition in the vitriolic

analog versus digital debate. And I'll probably touch on audio file objections now and again through the rest of this series, but let's get back to information storage. You store information on CDs in the form of little pits and and flat sections really, and a CD player has a laser that scans across the surf so of the c D and it detects these pits or the smooth sections. And these are very very small features on the c D.

On a casual glance, you would never see them. You would really need to look super close, like with a microscope to be able to see them. These sections on the c D represent zeros and ones, the binary digital information that the player will decode and then interpret as audio. On top of that, the laser starts from the inside edge of the c D and works outward in a spiral.

It's sort of the reverse of a vinyl album. So if you wanted to listen to a full vinyl album, you would put the needle or stylus on the outer edge of that album, and as the record turns on the turntable, the stylus makes its way down the spiral path of the groove, slowly moving towards the center of the record until it gets to the end of that side. C D s go the other way. The laser positions itself near the center for the beginning of the album, and then slow he moves outward toward the edge as

the album continues to play. The music industry's response to the introduction of this technology wasn't immediately overwhelming. Music studios thought was interesting, but a lot of the retail establishments kind of resisted. Uh. They expressed some reluctance, and they gave a lot of different reasons for their pessimism. One perceived shortcoming was that c D s are much smaller than vinyl records, and that meant they might more easily

be stolen. So there was a worry about shoplifting that these the c d s. Because of their form factor, you could probably shove one under your jacket and casually walk out of the record store and no one would be able to notice. Whereas vinyl albums took up more space, it was harder to to get away with that kind of stuff. One of the ways that some retailers tried to fix this perceived problem was in the packaging see PolyGram.

The division over at Phillips had come up with what would become the standard CD case, also known as the

jewel case. The purpose of the case was to protect the reflective surface of the c D that's the side that actually contains all the information on it, and the cases needed to hold that c D in place so it didn't slide around because it could potentially get scratched up if it slid around, And the case needed to be fairly inexpensive to produce, because otherwise it was going to add to the already premium price of a compact disc.

The original jewel cases were thicker than the ones that would come on later, and the original ones were less likely to break. They were much more resilient. But as competition drove companies to find ways to cut costs, many would take liberties with the design of the jewel cases and make them with less plastic material, make them thinner and less dirty. In North America, retailers would put the

CD jewel cases in what we're called long boxes. These packages were twelve inches in length that's about thirty point five centimeters. This was way longer than a jewel case was, but it meant that the boxes could easily fit in the displays that had previously held LP vinyl records, because that was about the same height as a vinyl record sleeve. So long boxes required special art or they were in generic white boxes that had sort of a a clear panel that would allow you to see the cover art

on the jewel case that was inside the box. The boxes were also harder to hide under a jacket or something, so they were thought of as a sort of theft deterrent strategy, but they were also really wasteful, and after pressure from several different fronts, including artists and consumers and environmental advocacy groups, it forced the industry's hand in the long box, said Farewell, and retailers focused on selling CDs that were just in the jewel case, albeit with other

anti theft measures put in place in you know, in

order to again deter that shoplifting. One retailer said that the smaller size might actually make consumers feel like they're not getting enough for their money, which I personally pretty funny since most people I know weren't thinking about the physical media so much as the experience to listening to the music that was stored on that media, And there was a reluctance to invest in a technology that would require retailers to double up on their inventories because they

would have to carry both vinyl records and c d s, or later on cassettes and CDs. That was something that the retailers were forced to do. As cassette tape sales grew beyond vinyl sales, they were supporting vinyl and cassettes, and then some were even doing vinyl, cassettes and CDs all at the same time. I was a kid in the eighties and I was completely unaware of CDs until

very late in the nineteen eighties. I always thought music was essentially available either on vinyl albums or This was way more common the cassette tape when I was a kid. That's largely because when CD players first came out, they were incredibly expensive, prohibitively so for my budget. So when we come back, I'll talk a little bit about what the earliest CD player was like and how much it cost, and then we'll talk more about the evolution of the

compact disc as a medium itself. But first let's take a quick break, all right. So I left off talking about how the first CD players were really expensive. Let's look at an example. The first consumer c D audio player to hit the market was Sony's c D P one oh one that retailed for nine D dollars as the base model. It was an even grand if you wanted to get the unit that had a remote control,

a little infrared remote control you could use. Adjusted for inflation, that would be the same as about two thousand, three hundred to two thousand five fifty dollars today just for a CD player, not like a full stereo system with speakers and everything. The CDs themselves cost about thirty dollars a piece, which, again if we adjust for inflation, is

today about seventy six dollars. So just imagine that albums costing more than seventy five bucks a pop. You really better like that band before you PLoP down the cash for their latest album. I found a review for the c d P one ah one player online which revealed some other interesting tedbits. For example, the prototype model that Sony had shown off earlier UH played discs vertically, with the playing surface parallel to the front of the player.

The c d P one oh one went with what would become the more traditional orientation for most CD players, with a horizontal tray that would slide out to accept

a c D before sliding back into the player. The review also went into how the CD would allow you to do things that you couldn't do with other types of recorded media and allowed you to to skip to specific track X or sometimes they call them bands on the CD, not bands as in musical bands, but bands is in bands of of recording, so track one, track two or band one band two made it really easy to select a specific passage or song on the c D. And it also the review marveled and how you could

quickly skim through a track and you could hear a sped up version of the music as you were going through, either fast boarding or rewinding. But while it was sped up, it didn't increase in pitch. You know, if you increase the rotational speed of a turntable, then the pitch of the record increases as well, something that lead to never

ending hours of entertainment. When I would put a thirty three rpm record on a turntable but switched the turntable to forty five rpm so that everything sounded like it was sung by the chipmunks. You really haven't listened to Pink Floyd's the Wall until you've listened to the Chipmunks saying Pink Floyd's the Wall. Anyway, that didn't happen with CDs because it was in a digital format. It wasn't an analog signal that was being sped up and with

a pitch increasing. It was literally just skipping through the digital file, so you would get this sped up effect, but the pitch remained the same. Another option that the review mentioned was the option to play a track on repeat. Apparently that merited special mentioned because it's again something that

you could not easily do on vinyl or cassette. Uh. You could do it like if you listen to a particular track on vinyl, after that track has finished playing, you could get up, walk over to the turntable, gently lift the stylus, gently move it back to the beginning of that track, drop it back down, and listen to it again. Cassettes were worse because you had to push stop, hit rewind, push play, find out where you are in the track. Maybe you've gone too far, maybe you haven't

gone far enough. Adjust that way. CDs made it so much easier. You could just hit a little button and it would repeat the song you liked as many times as you wanted until you got tired of it and you told it to stop. It happens to be baby Shark. You might just leave it on for weeks at a time for your child. Yeah, Anyway, the CD player really started to get popular in Japan pretty quickly, and Europe

followed not too long after that. It took longer to get traction in the United States, and part of that was just logistical because the manufacturing facilities for the players and for the c ds we're all in Japan, and those facilities were already chugging away to meet domestic demand. That left very little breathing room to produce units for

the US market. And in fact, in the beginning, there were only two manufacturing facilities in the entire world that were making compact discs, and they were each owned by Phillips and Sony. And that price was a really big barrier too, Like, not a lot of people were willing to jump in. There was a limited number of material out there for the players, and they were really expensive. Meanwhile,

cassettes and records were relatively cheap. It would take some time for the price to come down for CDs to start to gain on cassettes, but boy howdy, when it happened, it happened big time. The demand for compact discs in Japan led to more investment in the industry, and soon there were six manufacturing facilities, and not long after that it grew to forty manufacturing plants that were churning out

compact discs. The technology was gaining momentum, and with the increased output came improvements in manufacturing with more efficient processes, which led to a steady decrease in manufacturing cost, which meant companies could sell their products for less money while still maintaining a profitable business. This in turn led to wider adoption of the technology in general, and this is

how new tech typically works out. If it's new tech that you know, actually works and has an appeal to a customer base, the early versions are really expensive and sometimes prohibitively so for much of the intended market. Then you get early adopters. If you have enough of those jumping on, they're able to demonstrate that there's a demand

for that technology that merits additional investment. The investment means that you've paved the way for the rest of us to get a chance to join in once those price tags are more in line with our own personal budgets. So I'm thankful for early adopters. Um I don't quite make the money to be one most of the time anyway.

In the first year of sales, Sony sold twenty thousand CD players, which is not an enormous number, but it was significant for a brand new technology that was going head to head with vinyl and the emerging cassette market. And other companies besides Sony and Phillips began to make players as well. And it's here that I mentioned that the first CD title, according to some sources, wasn't Abba, nor was it a Symphony, but was rather Billy Joel's

album fifty two Street. In the last episode, I mentioned Abba and Classical Music were the first albums pressed to c D. Other sources called Billy Joel's album fifty two Street the first CD album UM, and then The Guardian says the first album recorded specifically with the c D medium in mind was Dire straits Uh Brothers in Arms in So it may well be that all of these

are true to some extent. That Abba and the Symphony were pressed to c D, UM, that Street was uh it debuted, and then one of the formats it debuted on was the c D, and that Brothers in Arms came out specifically four CDs and was engineered for that purpose. Maybe that's what it all means. All I can tell you is that history tends to be complicated, and there are a lot of stories out there that, at least

on first glance, seemed to contradict each other. Well, the music industry racked up sixteen points seven million dollars in CD sales. Uh, that's a lot of cash. But vinyl albums were bringing in one point nine billion dollars that same year, so nearly two billion compared to CDs at sixteen point seven million. Cassette tapes were not that far behind vinyl. In night three and the following year in eight four, cassettes sales surpassed vinyl and kept going strong,

and CDs were laying the foundation for future success. So this is what kind of set the tone, at least in the United States, for vinyl to go on the decline, cassettes to rule the eighties, and for CDs to be well positioned to take over after that. Sony even tried to get a jump on portable CD players in the

very very early days of the technology. Back in nineteen seventy nine, Sony had released the Walkman, the portable cassette player that was a popular accessory in the nineteen eighties just watch any comedy from the nineteen eighties or set in the nineteen eighties, and you'll likely see one you know, like Back to the Future. It factors into the plot

in the original Back to the Future. Anyway. By the mid nineties, Sony was trying to replicate the success of the Walkman with a CD player, and the result was the Discman D fifty, the world's first portable CD player. And while the D fifty had some shortcomings, it truly was an amazing technological achievement. See, the D fifty was small.

It was about the size of maybe five or six c D cases stacked on top of each other, so that meant all the circuitry and all the components of a full size c D player needed to be shrunk down to fit this tiny form factor. And this was just a couple of years after the full sized version of a CD player had come out. So it's hard to explain exactly how challenging this was, but here's an example. The optical path for the laser was a huge obstacle.

To work around the size constraints, Sony engineers had to figure out how to fold the optical path to make enough space for it. To have the laser position in the right way for the disc. On top of that, the engineers had to custom build all the circuits for the D fifty to both fit inside this small case and not immediately drain the batteries of all their juice. Even so, the D fifty was a pretty power thirsty gadget.

As Walkman Central, a fun website, has explained, you could buy a battery holder that would plug into the D fifty to supply the electricity you would need to jam out to your tunes. And one version was called the e P B nine C battery pack and it would hold either six C cell batteries sometimes called U eleven batteries in Britain at that time. They are about two

inches in length and about an inch in diameter. And another option was a big bulky rechargeable battery that would plug into the e P B nine C and you would put the D fifty inside this battery packets sort of acted like a protective case, and then you would wear the whole thing with a shoulder strap. So technically the system was portable, but it was kind of portable in the same way that the earliest portable phones were

portable you wouldn't want to go jogging with one. On top of that, this was before companies had developed anti skip software technologies that could keep a CD player on track even if the player were jostled by someone jogging or a car hitting a bump on the road or something. So moving around while listening to music might also mean

hearing some skipping as you did. So it wouldn't be until the mid to late nineties that that technology would start to make these portable systems much more viable, and by then the ending of the CD era was already on the horizon. The D fifty also was marketed as a more affordable compact disc player. It didn't cost nearly as much as the c d P one on one, which, if you remember, reta for a thousand dollars if you

wanted the version that came with a remote control. The D fifty came in at a budget price of just three fifty dollars in nineteen four, which is still admittedly pretty expensive. In fact, if we adjusted for inflation into two thousand nineteen dollars, that's about eight hundred fifty six bucks for a portable CD player. By seven, CDs were accounting for more than one point five billion dollars in sales.

Cassettes were still leading the pack, but CDs were now outperforming vinyl records at that time, so compact discs ended up catching up too, and then passing vinyl records sales, although you could argue that the final record sales were on the decline not from compact discs but rather from the domination of cassette tapes. In nine nine, the last year that cassettes would outperform compact discs, the two formats

were nearly neck and neck. Cassettes made up about three point six three billion dollars in sales revenue and see d s were at three point three six billions, so right behind, and in nine CD sales would outperform cassette sales, and it seemed like the compact disc would become the definitive medium for recorded music, but in truth it would

rain for less than a decade. Sales would peak in nineteen ninety nine and around fifteen billion dollars, and those figures would take a very slight dip in two thousand and then every year after that, CD sales figures were on the decline. We'll go more into that in just a second, so Japan was going nuts for compact discs shortly after their introduction, as well as a related technology, the mini disc, which failed to get very much support in the United States. In Europe, compact disc sales began

to pick up. Starting in nineteen five. PolyGram Phillips's music branch was leading the pack in CD production, with the partnership of CBS and Sony taking second place. Cassettes were still doing really well. Unlike the early as with compact discs, cassettes worked pretty well for car stereo systems and portable systems. You didn't have to worry about all that skipping. Plus, you could buy a blank cassette and you could record to them, and initially you could not do that with

compact discs. It wasn't until nine when companies started to develop the Compact Disc Recordable or c d R format, and even then it wasn't available on the consumer market. It took a few years for the tech to make its way to that market. It was available for professional use as early as nineteen uh Pioneer would go on to introduce a c d R for the consumer market

in nineteen six. The earliest CDR drives were slow. It took sometimes hours to burn data to a CDR, whether it was music or anything else, and because of other technological limitations, primarily how computers at the time we're not super well suited for dealing with really large file sizes, the qual do you burned music in the early days, if you were using a consumer c DR typically was lower than what you would get from a pre recorded

c D from a store. Still, the introduction of a writable disc meant that the CD was starting to catch up to all the benefits of having a cassette, and it also set the stage for the introduction of the c D r W or rewriteable compact disc, in which you can only record to c D but you can

also a race and re record to it. Phillips introduced a CD recorder for c D R and c D r W formats in ninete, and you could say that this also helped set up the c D for its eventual decline, as c ds became more popular, displacing cassettes, which in turn had displaced vinyl records. The music industry was I was dancing in the streets, I guess so speak. Sales were great. The industry was making more money than ever before, fifteen billion dollars in an enormous amount of money.

But part of that was due to what some other people would call false flags. People weren't just buying new albums. They were also repurchasing albums that they had already owned in other formats, like on cassette or vinyl, than they would go out and buy the CD version. And so while sales were great, it wasn't necessarily an indicator that

newer work was doing better than any preceding medium. It's not saying that, oh, we're selling more new albums now than we were when we were selling cassettes or vinyl records. It was more that a lot of people were backfilling their music libraries by going through the catalogs of these record labels and repurchasing these albums. I've seen the same

thing happen with tech stuff. Actually, as new listeners discover the show, they tend to dip into the back catalog of episodes, and so my numbers will bump up a bit whenever that happens, but you can't count on that going on indefinitely. Eventually those higher numbers will peak and then they'll decline. Now, if you're lucky, you can still see steady but probably less dramatic growth once things settled down.

If you're not lucky, you'll see sales continue to diminish over time, and c d s would be not lucky. I'll explain more in just a second, but first let's take another quick break. One of the big reasons, or actually two of the big reasons why c d s weren't lucky. It was a double ammy. It was in the form of computer advances and the development of audio

compression file formats, primarily the MP three. We'll go into more detail about m P three's and other foul formats in our next episode, but they definitely hurt CD sales as time went on. In two thousand, the music industry saw a decline in CD sales, and every year after that,

that decline continued and it got more dramatic. In an effort to fight off the inevitable and also to combat piracy, as computers were getting better at ripping music from c d s and writing it to a different disc, companies began to incorporate digital rights management, or DRM on their c d s. The idea was that this DRM would limit how you could actually use the compact disc. Sony's BMG music label did this to disastrous results. It's one of the the big warning signs warning stories of DRM

and unintended consequences, or potentially unintended. Some argue that they were completely intentional consequences, which makes it even worse. So what was this all about. Well, let's say you go out and you buy an album that was from Sony's BMG label, and this is around two thousand five or two thousand six. You buy this c D and you put in a normal CD player, Well, it would work just the way it was supposed to, no problems there. You're just putting it in a stereo system or maybe

your are a little portable CD player or whatever. It works just fine. However, if you were to put it into your computer, either to listen to it, or maybe you wanted to rip a copy so that way you had to back up something like that, something else happened. There was some code on the disks that would prompt your computer to automatically install some software on your PC. The purpose of the software, at least the stated purpose, was to prevent someone from making unauthorized copies of that

compact disc. In other words, to prevent people from pirating the music, but the software also opened up a backdoor vulnerability on the person's PC, meaning it was possible for a third party to infiltrate that computer and take control of it. Uh. In fact, essentially what was happening was the CD was prompting the computer to phone home to Sony b MGS servers and to give information about how the person was using that c D, what was there,

what were there listening habits. It was kind of spying on the consumer, and you could argue that the Sony b MG DRM software was behaving like malware, like a trojan horse or a backdoor vulnerability. The discovery of the DRM lad to class action lawsuits and a lot of pressure from the industry, and eventually Sony would stop the practice completely by two thousand seven. UM. It was not

a pretty picture. It was a very ugly story and also, like I said, a warning not just two companies, but to consumers that be aware that anytime you are introducing anything to your computer, there are the there are possible vulnerabilities you could be introducing. In some cases it could be really really intrusive, so you gotta be careful. Now, this is not to say that the decline of the compact disc was instantaneous, that the CD form factor and

went obsolete overnight. It stuck around for a really long time. In fact, it's only been fairly recently that some of the larger retailers have kind of moved away from selling c d s. In the winter of retailer best Buy announced that it was going to stop carrying compact discs and its stores starting on July one, two thousen. Target meanwhile went a slightly different route. They said they would continue to sell compact discs, but they would do it

on consignment. So, in other words, instead of ordering a large inventory of c ds and trying to sell them, you know, paying for that inventory, trying to sell the CDs and then if they didn't sell stock, they would send it back to the studio for credit for future stock. Instead of doing that now, Target says, no, here's how we're gonna do it. We will sell copies of CDs and for every copy we sell will send a little bit of money back to the studio. But other eyes,

we're not doing it. So if you don't want to work with us on that, you're not going to have your CDs held carried in our stores because people were buying so few of them now, and it puts the risk of inventory on the music studios rather than on targets stores, and it just changes where the risk ends

up falling. That change has continued, right, Uh, And really you could say that the writing was on the wall by two thousand fourteen, when digital music sales over the Internet were eclipsing CD revenue, and even then digital was on the decline. It was it was already on the downward slope. It had peaked at that point and was it was outperforming CDs, but both CDs and digital sales

were starting to lag behind. Like I said a moment ago, in our next episode, we're going to explore the rise of the digital file era, which leads into what we're seeing today with consumption moving more towards streaming services rather than downloading tracks or buying physical media. One thing I want to shift to before I end this episode would be the evolution of video media in the wake of the c D. The digital versatile disc or DVD evolved

from the compact disc. It was effectively the second generation of the c D technology. Even as companies like Sony and Phillips were trying to get the c D into the consumer market. They were simultaneously researching how to improve that technology in order to store even more data on it, including video with sound. That development would mostly happen behind closed doors for a little more than a decade among various companies. By the mid nine nineties, there were two

formats that had emerged from R and D departments. They weren't on the market yet, but they were almost ready, and one was with Sony and Phillips. They had developed a technology that they called the Multimedia c D or m M c D. Meanwhile, you had another group that was including the Time Warner Group and Toshiba, and they had developed a different approach called the Super Density or

s D disc. Neither side was eager to engage in an all out format war like the one that pitted Beta Max versus VHS and fractured the market, so instead they decided that they were going to work together to develop a common standard between them, and it was mostly

based off the s D format from Tashiba. This became the DVD and by companies were starting to produce DVD players, which originally went on sale in Japan and then expanded from there, and like CD players when they first came out, they were pretty darn expensive, but it actually the path for DVD to hit widespread adoption. It happened much more

quickly than CD players did. Like a CD player, a DVD uses a laser to read pits on the reflective surface of a disc, but the lasers in DVD players use a shorter wavelength of light than the lasers and CD players. A laser in a compact disc player emitst red light at a wavelength of around seven eighty nanometers, DVD players were in the sixty five and six hundred

fifty nanometer range. The shorter wavelength meant that the pits on a DVD can be smaller than those you would have on a c D. So smaller pits means you can pack more pits in the same amount of space, meaning you can put more data on the disc. And that's why you can fit a full length film on a DVD with audio using a compression format like IMPEG two and a c D can't hold that much information.

The DVD format brought with it improvements in picture and sound quality, and it also allowed for interactive features such as menus chapter selection, commentary tracks, bonus footage, that kind of stuff, So it really helped set it self apart from the VHS form factor the video tape, so the DVD format allowed consumers to navigate films more easily, So it kind of comparison between compact discs and audio cassettes. DVDs had the same advantages over video cassettes even when

they were first introduced. DVDs could hold more information than a typical VHS tape unless you were, you know, using like a consumer video tape and you were recording at the slowest possible setting, meaning that you were using the least amount of tape to capture video. It would result in the lowest quality video, but you would be able to put a lot of it onto a single tape. Well, DVDs could hold way more information than your your standard,

uh good VHS tape. These DVDs were single side, single layer discs, but the format allowed for up to two recordable layers per side, so you would get a double layer disc or even a double sided double layer disc. With a double layer disc, the reading laser can actually focus through one layer of data on a disk to

see a second layer written underneath it. You can think of it almost like imagine you've got two sheets of paper and you've used a very dark ink, and the paper itself is almost translucent, and you can read what's written on the top sheet, and you can look through the top sheet and see what's written on the bottom sheet. Well, imagine you've got like some sort of magic X ray glasses that let you read the bottom sheet as if there was nothing, you know, obscuring your view. That's kind

of how a double layer DVD works. The single layer DVD can hold up to four point thirty eight gigabytes worth of information. A single sided double layer DVD can hold seven point nine five gigabytes, not quite twice as much as a single layer DVD. So why is that?

Why can a double layer DVD only hold a little less than twice as much while it's because, in order to avoid interference between layers, the pits on a double layer DVD have to be slightly longer than they would first single layer, so you can pack slightly less information

per layer. Thus it's not quite twice as much. If you have a double sided, double layered DVD, you could store whopping fifteen point nine gigabytes of information on it then That would end up being dwarfed by Blu Ray later on, but at the time it was incredibly impressive. The DVD caught on faster in the market than the contact disc did. It only took a few years before

DVD sales were outperforming VHS. It was early two two when the DVD Entertainment Group broke that news video rental stores were starting to phase out VHS copies of the film. They were leaning harder on the DVD format themselves, and the writing was on the wall, despite the fact that even in two thousand two, there were more than twice as many, how useholds that had VCRs as those that

had DVD players. There were ninety six million households the head of VCR, and twenty five million had a DVD player. But people with DVD players were spending more buying more films, so it was pretty much a sign of what was to come. This was also really good news to the movie and TV studios out there. And unlike VCRs, your standard consumer DVD player had no way of writing two disks, so there was no way to copy discs, at least

not initially. There were computers that would get DVD R drives, and you could invest in some specialized equipment to copy disks, but most people didn't have access to that, and in the early days, it took a long time to write a significant amount of data to a DVD, So studios had less of an adverse reaction to the DVD format compared to the VHS tape. They didn't see it as a threat to their business. On top of that, the industry's experience with VCRs had taught it the incredible value

of the home market. They knew there's this market of consumers eager to buy up a catalog of movies, so they had already established that with VCRs, and they were able to apply that with DVDs. It gave these companies ways to monetize their back catalogs of films and television shows.

So they leverage that knowledge with the DVD format. And unlike the prerecorded VHS tapes when they first came out, you know, those those cost eight dollars apiece when they first debuted in the early eighties, DVDs were much more reasonably priced. They typically fell around the twenty dollar range for a single film. The extras really helped too. They gave creators the chance to provide more insight into their work.

Fans got way more material. They could watch a show or a movie with commentary to learn about what went into making it. They could hear about behind the scenes drama or challengers the makers faced when they were making their productions. Not every DVD contained that kind of extra, but enough of them did to create sort of an expectation among collectors. Uh. It also meant that sometimes a show that had gone off the air would come back because there'd be a demonstrable demand for that show. A

big example of that is Family Guy. It was on Fox, it got canceled, the DVDs went on sale, the sales were really good, and it convinced Fox to bring the program back. The DVD also opened up opportunities for different versions of the same work. Ask any fan of a movie like Brazil or Blade Runner or Evil Dead about their DVD collection, and you'll likely hear that they own

several different copies of their favorite film. This created yet another way for companies to profit from their catalogs, will simultaneously satisfying the insatiable demands of consumers and yep I own a few different copies of Evil Dead, so I'm one of those suckers anyway. Like the VHS era, the DVD also create opportunities for independent makers to burn their works directly to disk, by passing the studios and going

straight to market. So the direct to DVD industry thrived as well, and some companies like Circuit City tried to launch a competitor to DVD. The Circuit City version was called Digital Video Express or DIVIS, not to be confused by the codec that's the same name. A DIVIS player required a connection to a phone line, so each DIVIS disk had a barcode on it that the player would be able to read, and it could send information over the phone line to a centralized server which kept track

of all the discs on the network. If you purchased a basic disc, you would get essentially a license to view the movie within forty eight hours. If you wanted to watch it after those forty eight hours were over, you would have to pay for an upgrade to watch it for some more viewing time, and even then it's just another two days. There was a pretty strong negative reaction from the home theater enthusiasts out there, and the format did not do well, in fact, it only took

a year by Circuit City pulled the plug on dvics. Now, in our next episode, I'm gonna talk a little bit more about the DVD industry and the lead into h D DVD and Blu Ray, which is really another format war we're going to talk about. We won't spend too much time on those formats because while they can pack more information on a desk than DVD can, they work on essentially the same principle. Then we're gonna transition to

digital files and streaming services to sort of conclude this series. Uh, If you guys have suggestions for other topics, whether it's something I should do a full series on or maybe just a standalone episode, send me an email. The addresses tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com. Pop on over to our website that's tech stuff podcast dot com. You'll find an archive of all of our older episodes, plus links to our social media presence on there, so you can reach out to me on Facebook or on Twitter.

You can also check out our online store. We've got some fun stuff in there. Go see that stuff and maybe about some of it. Don't just look at it, but because it goes to help the show and greatly appreciate it, and I'll talk to you again. Really said. Text Stuff is a production of I heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.