40 years of the CD - and it’s not dead yet

“Will Smith, Willennium?!”, scoffs Ricky Gervais’s misanthropic widower Tony Johnson in the latest series of After Life, as he’s trawling through his somewhat retentive brother-in-law’s in-car CD collection. “Yes,” Matt replies, “as in the Millennium.” “Yeah,” Tony retorts, “about the last time someone bought a CD.” 

Well, actually, not, according to new figures from the UK record labels’ association, the BPI, which revealed that after a 17-year decline, CD sales have picked up again. I should point out that this reverse was the result of blockbuster albums last year by Adele, Ed Sheeran and ABBA and, presumably, shifting in vast quantities from supermarket checkouts (take an educated guess as to who bought them). But as someone who still buys physical media, and has largely eschewed streaming, I do take a somewhat Luddite pleasure in knowing that CDs - in the format’s 40th year - are still selling. I like to think that it’s the result of the same sense of tactility that keeps me hanging on to physical music formats, more so than any considerations of sonic fidelity. It’s this thinking that CDs, like vinyl records and even cassettes, appeal to a combination of the newly middle-aged, the baby boomers and younger hipsters who’ve bought into the kitsch appeal of the older formats. 

The CD was an evolution of the clunky LaserDisc format that appeared at the end of the 1970s. Philips, one of the companies involved in its development then joined forces with Sony to develop an audio-only optical disc, which appeared in the summer of 1982. The first CD player went on the market that October, with the promise of a format offering “perfect sound forever”. For my part, I was a relatively late convert: I was still a teenager in 1982 with little awareness of this new hi-fi Eldorado. On top of that, the first player  was well outside my economic scope, given that my meagre paper round wages were mostly spent on vinyl and cassettes at Our Price. 

“The first player cost $1,000 – a lot of money in 1982,” Philips research scientist Jacques Heemskerk told The Guardian a few years ago. “We developed the discs and the players at the same time, then licensed the technology to other companies to make their own. Once we convinced Panasonic, all the others followed.” The price of players would soon start to come down. Philips and Sony invested heavily in marketing the CD. “We needed to do a lot of advertising and knew pop music would be the largest market, but we couldn't start with anything extreme, like punk,” explained Heemskerk. “So we made a deal with Dire Straits to promote it: their music was all put on CD, and they appeared in posters and advertisements. When Brothers In Arms became the first million-selling Compact Disc, we knew we’d underestimated how quickly it would become the dominant format. The vinyl album was so established, and in the US it seemed unthinkable that the cassette would disappear. But after that, things changed very, very quickly. Despite this, it would be a full 13 years before I took the plunge and bought my first CD, the result of taking a PR job at Philips, having access at last to a player. But even by 1995, when I came to work for the company, there were new challengers on the horizon, including Philips' own ill-fated Digital Compact Cassette format, and Sony’s MiniDisc.

27 years on, my CD collection continues to grow, as does my vinyl library, with the decision as to which format seemingly arbitrary. Before I moved in with my wife-to-be, I chose CDs to listen to in the car on the drive between South-East and South-West London, and vinyl for the at-home experience. Since moving in, a month before lockdown, I’ve worked almost exclusively from home, with a CD-only system in the living room where I work, and the turntable elsewhere, making the purchase decision even more random and based on choosing the format to match the ‘mood’ of how I want to consume the music - i.e. partially on in the background, or fully muso-style with no distraction. Yes, I’m a nerd. But even experts can’t make up their minds which is best. “When CDs first came in, I was decorating my house,” recalled Philips’ Heemskerk. “So I decided to get rid of all my vinyl albums, and get my old Rolling Stones and Beatles records on CD. It still hurts. Even though I worked on the CD, and it’s technically the best, I’m not sure people will have the same warm, emotional feeling towards them as I did with the vinyl album, with the beautiful 12in artwork.”

Of course the Compact Disc, being just that, does have its significant ergonomic advantage over vinyl, but the audiophile view is that vinyl is better. There’s a degree of fetishism to that, but as my teenage step-daughters will attest, having asked for and receiving only vinyl for Christmas, records will always be cooler than CDs, which are not and have never been cool to them. 

For a product born of the 1980s, the decade of somewhat sterile modernity, a music format that was as perfect as digital technology could enable seemed appropriate. It was also simple to use and totally portable, which led to the commoditisation of CD drives appearing in any electrical appliance that could fit one. It also contributed partly to the obesity crisis, because once inserted in the player, a CD would, unlike a record, not require getting up out of the chair to turn over, and could even be manipulated using a remote control.

I’ve actually lost count of the number of CDs I’ve accumulated since my first foray into the format, 27 years ago. Much of this is the result of rampant consumerism on my part, as the acquisition of a CD player coincided with my first visits to the United States when, in the days of two dollars to the pound (yeah, cheers Brexit…) I’d start any holiday or business trip to the US with a trolley dash around the nearest branch of Tower Records. I once took a 12-hour round trip from Mammoth Lakes in California to Fresno - via Yosemite National Park - just to buy a Red Hot Chilli Peppers CD, before returning to Mammoth via a giant loop around the bottom of the Sierra Nevada mountains and then back up north on the near-mythical Highway 395. 

On another occasion, I went to visit a former executive of Sky TV at her new palatial office in The Helmsley Building in New York after another trolley dash around a nearby branch of Tower. Before we could properly catch up, her waste bin was full of cellophane wrappings, stripped from new purchases in the hope of not drawing attention at customs in London. That, in itself, highlighted one of the most annoying things about the CD - the so-called ‘jewel case’ (itself the subject of a lucrative and vigorously defended patent owned by Philips), which was a pain to open, with the spindle thingy in the middle often losing teeth. Buying in the US was even more trepidatious thanks to a near-impregnable wrap that required a surgical scalpel to get open, thanks to a pull tab that NEVER worked.

I can’t even remember what my first CD was: I know it wasn’t Brothers In Arms, which became most associated with the format’s acceptance in the mainstream thanks to Philips’ marketing tie-up with Dire Straits (the CD’s earliest appeal seemed to veer towards classical music enthusiasts). My collection grew to around 1200 CDs at one point, infused by hundreds of cover-mount discs from monthly music magazines. In 2010 I decided to downsize, taking a good half of that library to a specialist ripping service in Arnhem (I was living in the Netherlands at the time) to have it industrially transferred to a hard drive, covering the cost by selling the discs to a record shop in Amsterdam for a euro each. A decent deal. What was left were the albums I couldn’t bear to part with, albums like all true music obsessives I’ve probably owned on different format over the years, and have been sucked into the marketing hype of remastered special editions. This duality has been perpetuated most expensively by the purchase of the posthumous Bowie box sets as CD packages, in addition to the odd fetish vinyl acquisition.

The CD isn’t, however, perfect. It is just a little bit…uh…dull. Industry experts I worked with would refer to it as a “carrier”, which is about as anodyne a description as you could come up with. No wonder the CD always used to lose out in the NME’s regular ‘Vinyl, CD or MP3?’ questionnaire. But what it lacks in cool it makes up for in convenience. When I first started buying CDs, the game changer was the ability to take what seemed like hundreds of albums on holiday in one of those clear-sleeve cases. But then the iPod came along. And Napster, and with it the seismic shift from physical media ownership to digitisation. Some will say that this was a linear development: just as the digital CD was meant to kill off analogue formats, the ripping of CDs to playback on iPods and then phones opened the door to the removal of physical media altogether, in the process denuding the record industry and artists of the wheelbarrows of cash they’d earned for decades.

I accept that streaming is cheaper. It also allows an album to be auditioned before making a longer-term commitment. And what better convenience than storing all your music in the cloud, freeing up shelving for…whatever. I, however, will still maintain, delusional perhaps, that there is nothing quite like a physical music library. When we first bunkered at home for lockdown we became used to Zoom calls with colleagues and friends carefully framed in front of well-stuffed bookshelves to make them look erudite and well read. Interviewees for TV news bulletins appeared to compete with each other to see who had the most exotic book collection. But a record library - different matter. And when you think about it, you can cram more CDs into one than vinyl. At risk of sounding intrinsically shallow, I’ll take that. Long live the CD.

Put the needle on the record...

(Picture: Naomi Davison)

In a week that began with the ever-youthful Gary Crowley talking about his 40 years listening to, playing and talking about music, one which continued with the premiere of a documentary about singer-songwriter Beatie Wolfe's idiosyncratic approach to making music tangible, Saturday arrives with a celebration of the album itself. For today is the second annual National Album Day, a combined UK initiative of the BPI, the Entertainment Retailers Association and the Association of Independent Music, designed to embrace all that is good, still, about the album as a complete body of musical work.

It comes at a time of continuing mixed emotions about how we consume our music. Just last week I reviewed Sheryl Crow’s album Threads which, she says, is likely to be her last due to the changing consumption model of consumers effectively sequencing their own listening via the pic’n’mix of streaming services. And, yet, at the same time, the 50th anniversary re-release of The Beatles’ Abbey Road went straight into the album chart at No.1 when it was released two weeks ago, something of a reaffirmation of the album format from the very band which, according to music journalist David Hepworth, invented the LP with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, 52 years ago.

According to National Album Day's organisers, the album as a packaged piece of music remains a robust proposition. 143 million albums, they say, were either streamed, downloaded or purchased in the UK in 2018, a 6% increase on 2017 and worth approximately £1.3 billion. A healthy state of affairs, it must be said, and made shinier by the 4.2 million vinyl LPs sold last year, although this must be still seen as just under 3% of the overall number of albums shifted, even if representing a 25-year high for the format.

Where all these sales are coming from is, actually, hard to identify: friends of mine who used to be dyed-in-the-wool record buyers are now just as likely to be listening to new albums via Spotify, unfussed by either the lack of tactile interaction or the reduced fidelity created by streaming compression. And, yet, the notion that young consumers are eschewing albums-whole for the selectivity of YouTube on mobile-friendly platforms could equally be a misnomer, if the experience of accompanying my 14-year-old step-daughter into Kingston’s Banquet Records recently was anything to go by. What may, though, be preventing today’s teenagers from replicating how I began my record collection at the same age may simply be economics. Paying more than £20 for a vinyl record is certainly beyond most pocket money budgets if serious collation is going to take place.

Visiting the HMV at Bluewater yesterday it was notable how much vinyl had crept back into a shop space that would, as recently as a couple of years ago been occupied by CDs. However, here lies the peculiarity of HMV’s continued survival strategy: the Bluewater shop's most prominent racks contained a strange mixture of new and old - Elbow’s brand new album Giants Of All Sizes sat next to ‘staff picks’ like Steely Dan’s Aja. Nothing wrong with either of those records (and stay tuned for my own review of the Elbow release), but there was an incongruity in what was prominent and what wasn’t. Elsewhere yesterday HMV - the chain that less than a year ago called in administrators for the second time in a decade, resulting in dozens of branch closures - opened its biggest ever retail space, ‘The Vault’ in Birmingham. Covering 25,000 square feet, it promises to be a “nirvana for music and film fans”, with dedicated spaces for vinyl, CDs, Blu-ray Discs and DVDs, as well as a stage for in-store performances. It is a brave move by the chain: even when musicians themselves are seeing their own incomes challenged by the relatively meagre returns from online music services (most make more money these days from touring than they do from releasing records), music retailing via so-called ‘bricks and mortar’ outlets is under threat from the twin terrors of high rents and the likes of Amazon.

In this mix lies the emotional act of buying a record. If you can buy an album for £1 less on Amazon and without the hassle of going out to buy it or the add-on costs of bus fares or car parking, plus that latte in Costa you weren’t planning but had anyway, record shops are heading for an even darker future. That places like Kingston’s Banquet and my favourite, Casbah Records in Greenwich, still appear to be thriving - if challenged by prevailing ‘market conditions’ - is a welcome throwback. HMV’s owner Doug Putnam still believes the need for a physical, tangible music consumption experience is driving their belief in opening a store like The Vault. “We know that people want to stream music when they're out, but also want to physically go in store and purchase something special, something they love, to add it to their collection at home,” he told the BBC.

"We all want human interaction but do we want to pay for it?", countered retail analyst Richard Hyman. "I think [The Vault] is a very courageous venture but it'll need more than courage to make the economics stack up." There is a view that I share that record shops are being kept open by two factors: firstly, old heads like me, clinging on to physical music ownership much as their hairlines recede and their waistlines expand, and secondly, younger consumers being drawn to the niche experience of buying ‘a vinyl’. Certainly a visit, the other Saturday, to Soho’s Sister Ray Records supported the first of these views, judging by the exclusively male, middle-aged clientele.

Their interest, I’m sure, is much like mine - the discovery of albums as complete experiences. It’s why this year’s National Album Day - which is being championed by Elbow themselves, Lewis Capaldi and Mark Ronson - is focusing on the theme of ‘Don’t Skip’, to encourage the discovery and enjoyment of albums as total bodies of work, to be consumed from first to last track as a single, arcing narrative. It’s the consumption experience that David Hepworth drew from with his brilliant tome A Fabulous Creation: How the LP Saved Our Lives, which traces the evolution of the LP through his own experience, his eyes being opened by 1967’s Sgt. Pepper, before seeing it disappear with the advent of the CD and its remote-controlled skipability. ‘Long playing records’ had existed way before The Beatles’ opus but, argued Hepworth, Pepper turned the LP into something other than a vestibule for songs, a package of listening and looking. It was probably the first concept album, launching a series of ‘themed’ records from ever more progressive artists, including The Beatles themselves, but also The Who with Pete Townshend’s rock operas, Tommy and Quadrophenia, Bowie and his recurring astronautical subplots, and of course the prog giants like King Crimson and Pink Floyd, each presenting music as theatrical suites.

Hepworth’s book got to the nub of the album buying experience. It may be considered a cliche to think of nerdish types in record shops pouring over the everlasting trope of gatefold sleeves and Storm Thorgerson cover art, but it was (and still is) part of the total act of ownership, right up to and including the moment the needle was placed on the intro groove, to flipping over to Side 2 and then watching the stylus go back and forth on the outro groove. Hepworth’s description of shared house ownership and the obsession of male housemates with speaker cables and hi-fi separates is certainly one I can appreciate. I’m still a hi-fi separates man to this day. Hepworth, however, saw the beginning of the end for this experience when he first encountered a Sony Walkman when interviewing Stewart Copeland in 1980. If he wasn’t all that enamoured by Sony’s miniaturised music experience, with its tinny headphones, the next few years, with CDs and the arrival of MTV, sounded the death knell for Hepworth for the album as that total, beginning-middle-end experience. Selective consumption had now arrived. Skip-play technology had done for the album. “You can fill your room with the very best loudspeakers,” Hepworth concluded in his book. “You can spend your money on a pristine new copy of your favourite album. It can be produced on the highest quality vinyl. It can feel reassuringly weighty in your hand,” he says of today’s ‘new’ vinyl experience. The really difficult bit, he says whimsically, “will be convincing yourself that for the next 40 minutes you have nothing better to do than listen to that record. Because that’s how it was back in the golden age of the LP. It seemed as though we had all the time in the world.”

Perhaps we have lost patience. Perhaps the instant reassurance some have from looking at their phones every ten seconds is a sign that we have become digitally restless. Strange, then, that the Netflix and Amazon model is largely catered towards those who can binge through hours of box sets in a single sitting. Why we can’t do that with albums, I can’t say, although I could very easily, given the opportunity. As I write this I’m currently on the second consecutive and complete listen to Elbow’s Giants Of All Sizes. Perhaps it’s a rare luxury to be able to do so on a Saturday afternoon, but it’s how I’ve always preferred to hear albums, even delaying getting out of the car to finish up the final track of a CD. From first to final, before repeating and listening all over again, that’s the correct way to do it.

“Some artists see the album as a collection of short stories,” Elbow themselves say in the official National Album Day press release. “We see the album as a novel. Songs are often included or omitted on account of the balance of the overall record rather than on their individual merits.” The band themselves see the television binge model as a parallel: “To suggest the album is under threat because of [streamed] playlists is to suggest that movies will disappear on account of television, they are two completely different things.” Geoff Taylor, the BPI chief executive, backs this view: “The album is where an artist gives the fullest expression to their creative vision at a given moment in time. It’s a musical novel, where multiple themes can intertwine to deliver a cultural experience deeper than a single song, the summit of a performer’s art.” Album ownership, like dogs being for more than Christmas, shouldn’t be about a single 24 hours, be it National Album Day, Record Store Day, or any other such industrial cause. But with some viewing this medium as continuing to hang by a thread, a little indulgence can’t do any harm.