It was 41 years ago this week that music consumers first encountered the compact disc.
“It was on Aug. 17 of 1982, at a factory outside the city of Hanover in Germany, that the band ABBA received a very particular honor,” Time magazine reported in a 2015. “…A CD of the band’s album ‘The Visitors’ was pressed that day. And it wasn’t just any CD — it was the first CD ever manufactured. The new technology would go on sale in Japan later that year, and in other markets around the world the following March.”
Ric Tomasi, who owns Music Unlimited in Kingston and the Music Box in Plymouth — both of which still sell CDs and vinyl — recalled his first CD.
“It was March 23, 1987, when I got the Whitesnake self-titled album at Tweeter,” he recalled, noting that even though CDs hit the market a few years earlier, they weren’t readily available everywhere. “Even when I went to Tweeter that day, there were probably only about 24 CDs available. But I remember having my Sony Discman, mowing the lawn, listening to that CD.”
The 2015 Time story stated that CD players themselves cost up to $1,000 (about $3,168 today) in 1982, with CDs priced at about $17 apiece (about $53.75 today).
But these days, CD sales have waned, even as some relics of the music business have returned — vinyl records and turntables.
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“Vinyl is huge now, and not just with baby boomers or Gen Xers,” Tomasi said. He said modern artists like Taylor Swift release vinyl versions of their albums, sometimes in different colors.
“And her fans want all the different colors,” he said. “And some of the kids today just want the record jackets for art on their walls. I sometimes sell vinyl to people who don’t even have record players.”
The vinyl boom is not going bust anytime soon, according to Variety magazine.
“In the first half of 2023, vinyl LP sales were up 21.7% from the same period the year before, a robust vote of confidence for the format that has dominated album sales in recent years,” the magazine reported last month. “That’s one of the findings in Luminate’s Midyear Music Report… 2022 marked the 17th consecutive year that vinyl saw a rise, so it was perhaps inevitable that 2023 would keep the streak going.”
Tomasi said CDs still sell to people of all ages for different reasons.
“I sold about $40 in CDs the other day,” he said. “People still buy them, whether they are for keepsakes or not.”
Billboard notes that CD sales peaked in 2000.
“But though the format has been in steady decline throughout the streaming era, retail, manufacturing and management sources say the digital discs have gained in popularity as keepsakes,” Billboard stated. “More portable than vinyl albums and less affected by manufacturing delays due to supply chain issues, CDs are once again becoming merch table mainstays, and in the first 10 weeks of 2023, sales are up slightly over the same period last year, according to Luminate — 6.8 million in 2022 to 6.9 million, a 2.5% increase.”
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