When did the compact disc overtake the vinyl record?

And how did sales of cassette tapes ever compared to either format?

You can read these questions however you will: overtake in terms of dollars, in terms of numbers sold, etc.

A google search didn't turn up this information.

As for me, I bought vinyl records until about 1986, whereupon I switched to cassette; I didn't get a CD player until about 1993. After a few years sticking with the CD, I started buying vinyl again around 1997. For reference, I was born in 1977.

I get the sense that I was very late to the compact disc; perhaps it overtook vinyl in 1988? 1989? Earlier?

Some numbers at the end of this article -

http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19900121&slug=1051873

CDS CLIMBING THE CHARTS

Manufacturers' shipments (in millions)

1988 1989 percent

change

LPS 43.48 17.53 -59.69

CDS 70.45 96.87 +37.51

CASSETTES 208.09 211.31 +4.45

so cassettes outsold LPs and CDs combined at the end of the 1980s! WTF.

most are probably filling out landfills or salvation army stores right now.

also: will the classical-music market ever drive technological innovation in music reproduction again? (as it did with the 33RPM LP and the CD.)

I was born in 1977 and I never bought anything by cassette during my childhood and early teen years. I didn't get a cd player until I was 15(1992). I didn't start buying vinyl (for dance music and cd's for other stuff) until my late teens(1995) and I have been exclusively vinyl for maybe the last 4-5 years.

I offer this as an example because no one I knew as a kid bought anything but cassettes. They went into your walkman, they went into the car stereo, and they went into your boombox. In my mind, young people didn't start having CD's until the early 90's. Once I got a stereo with a CD player, I bought a Sony Discman a short while later and that is when my purchases switched over to CD exclusively.

This was kind of a bummer because I lived a few miles away from The Record Collector in Redford, Michigan. It was close enough that I could ride my bike down there on a summer day. They used to have this huge used cassette section and everything was stupid cheap. An expensive tape was like 3.99, most of them were 1.99. I was a great way for a young kid to take chances on new stuff in the days before the internet. I didn't have older siblings, so I had to figure all this stuff out for myself through trial and error. I bought a lot of crappy music in those days but I also stumbled into some gems. Moving to CD was a bummer because used stuff was in the 7-10 dollar range back then.

I was born in 1986 and didn't have a CD player until around 98 or so. I was all cassette until then.

also: will the classical-music market ever drive technological innovation in music reproduction again? (as it did with the 33RPM LP and the CD.)

I doubt it because there isn't much money to be made there anymore. I don't consider myself an expert, but has most new symphony recording moved offshore because production costs are just too high in the US.

There really isn't much left to be done with music technology. The fidelity can only go so high before the playback equipment is better than our biology. The main thing that is still left is improving compression technology so that lossless 24/96 recordings are smaller than mp3s. The only other thing is improving the software so that it can finally replace the outboard stuff that still cannot be fudged in the box. Once that happens, there really isn't anywhere left to go that is strictly about recorded music.

After that, the only things left will be bluring the lines between film/music/and video games and working out new user interfaces for the instruments of the future. Those things are interesting, but by that point it will not strictly be about "recording" anymore.

i got a cd player around 89-90. i stopped buying vinyl around 1985 and bought tape pretty heavily for that 5 year period. i regret it because cassettes are a bs format and i swallowed the death of vinyl mindset just like all the other dorks.

A more direct way to answer that question is that Guitar Hero is the next step in music reproduction. I haven't heard any development plans regarding Cello Hero or Conductor Hero. Passive media is going to become an anachronism in the next couple decades. There isn't enough of a classical market to drive the funding needed to make hi-tech commercial product happen.

the first cd my family bought was the La Bamba soundtrack. first cd I ever owned was the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle soundtrack. apparently only soundtracks were allowed in my household.

and as far as cassettes, shit, man, those things still had prevalence as late as like the 2000s. I mean they weren't selling anywhere near as much but stores still carried them enough to a degree that I still bought them through like 2001. cuz I was a cheap motherfucker, which is why I own the Marshall Mathers LP on cassette like a fucktard.

yeah, I remember the store at the mall having a small cassette section through like 2004-05

ugh i wish i hadn't been so cheap. had to buy so many albums twice cuz of all the good stuff i stupidly bought on cassette in the 00s.

i had forgotten that a big reason i was late in moving to CDs was simply that they were more expensive than cassettes, and didn't turn up used in the same numbers. like the poster above, i bought many of my cassettes used for $3–$5, and a lot more from Columbia House for even less than that. for the same reason the first CDs i bought were catalogue titles, like dylan and aretha franklin albums (not yet remastered, available new for $7 or $8).

i've bought a lot of things twice for this reason -- first on cassette, then on CD. i got rid of the vast majority my cassettes some time after college, ca. 1999–2000. soon after i banished the cassette deck to my mom's basement. but ironically (?) many of the CDs i bought to replace cassettes (like all the smiths albums) i've since converted to MP3 and gotten rid of in turn. there's probably some kind of lesson there, for example, that i don't owe the record industry much.

IIRC it wasn't until the mid-late 1990s that Columbia House and BMG Music Service started offering CDs for the same kinds of deals they had been offering cassettes. am i mistaken in this? i do recall holding off on joining the CD version of the club because not just the list prices (outrageous $20 for a new album on CD) but the "discount" prices were much higher than those for cassettes, like 60% higher.

The New York Times produced a convenient infographic a day ago to answer the question, oddly enough

http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2009/08/01/opinion/01blow.ready.html

wow, thanks!

if you believe that graph, it's shocking how little the so-called "vinyl comeback" has impacted overall sales. i had to squint to even detect any uptick in the past few years.

But also, the combined CD-downloads histogram bars of 2008 are pretty comparable to the "2008 dollars" of 1978's 8track-LP-single-cassette. I look at that chart and if confirms my suspicions: CDs by the late-90s had a HUGE margin.

yeah, i think a growing consensus says that by the late 1980s the industry was growing accustomed to HUGE profit margins. this is precisely why they were quickly gobbled up by major multinational media corporations, and i think it's the reason why they were so critically reluctant to embrace digital formats or anything that would threaten the centrality of the CD.

if the industry could have somehow allowed themselves to shrink back to pre-1980s size, they might not be in the same hole. but that's a HUGE what-if. first of all, i'm not sure their corporate parents would have permitted it. second, who WOULDN'T get addicted to huge profits?

Does that casette figure up top include blanks? That would go quite some way to explaining the disparity - casettes were the only easy to record to blank media until the CDR came along which wasnt til the mid 90s at least.

i doubt it; i imagine it's prerecorded music only, otherwise it would through the comparison out of whack.

Yeah fair point - I was just thinking though that I only ever bought like, one or 2 proper albums on casette. Sure, I used them a lot when it was the only portable media but only by recording my vinyl to blanks. I stuck to vinyl right up to and beyond when I got my CD player in 1990, I think it was.

That NY Times graph's quite amazing. Can't believe sales of 8 tracks were worth $3.1 billion dollars in 1978, or have I misread the figures and that's the cumulative amount?

well, that's adjusted for inflation (that is, the actual dollar figure was less, but it's $3.1 billion in today's cash), but yeah it's still a lot of money. and where are all those 8-tracks now?

In Finland the cassette was certainly more prevalent than vinyl or CD at least in the latter half of the 80s and for the first couple of years to the 90s. I was born in 1979, and in that era none of the kids/teens I knew bought anything on vinyl, it was all cassettes. I think vinyl was mostly bought by "music hipsters" (due to better sound quality?), whereas cassettes was what regular people bought. CDs became more prevalent than cassettes around 1993 I think.

I started buying CDs around 1992 and, though I never stopped buying vinyl, by '94 or so I was 80% CD and even my later audiophile adventures didn't change that figure much.

I probably own fewer than a dozen pre-recorded cassettes but I do remember them being the default format for a lot of people (the advent of the in-car CD player was probably a major blow to their popularity).

Woolworths had a pretty impressive back-catalogue on cassette (far more so than CD or vinyl, it seemed); an audiophile friend of mine, fairly bizarrely, bought most of his music on tape between 1988 and 1994 (he had a high-end Nakamichi deck). He then spent the second half of the '90s replacing everything with CDs.

I listened to a lot of 45rpm pop singles as a kid. Then did some cassette time with an early Walkman.

As soon as I started buying records for myself, it was always vinyl. Vinyl was cheaper than any other format, and in plentiful supply. This was like 1984-1992. I guess I got a cd player in '92 and pretty much only bought CD's used. It was primarily a cost issue.

In the late 90s, most records I wanted to buy weren't readily available on vinyl. So I just combed through CD bins to find cheap and used copies of whatever I was into. I also bought records and CDs from bands on tour; direct.

Since I started to DJ in the last 6-7 years, I've gone back to buying 99% of my music on vinyl only. CDs just feel like plastic coasters to me a lot of the time. I get too many promos. I hate them. But when I buy a new record of a release I'm really excited about and feel that heavy vinyl, I get really happy.

But very recently I got a car with a cassette deck and I bought a lot of 17 Rush cassettes of ebay. That's all I keep in the car.

My first friend to get a CD player got his in 1990, and his parents bought him CDs of most of the albums he liked that he owned on cassette; he gave me the cassettes. I got one in 1992, shortly before I left for college. I had/still buy things on vinyl, cassette, and CD. Cassettes I'll buy at the thrift store for 50 cents/$1. I'll buy vinyl if I can't find something on CD and want to support the local shop or the artist. I got about 50 or so records for free when I worked at the music library in college and they were converting their collection to CD, when possible. There was also a summer flood at one point, and some of the records I got had covers with water damage. Almost all of these are classical and opera.

(xpost to Michael) Very simlar for me: I bought nothing but vinyl until early 1992. Around then my stylus became very unreliable so I started buying some stuff on cassette. Then at the end of the year I got a new stereo (with a CD player) so from 1993 onwards about 80% of what I bought was on CD. I'm guessing Britain was behind America in adopting this technology: when my Dad got his first CD player in 1989 this was a BIG DEAL - I don't think I'd ever heard a CD before and I was expecting some kind of magical sound transformation.

The first time I heard a CD was probably in 1985. It was the main theme from Star Wars and at the time it sounded amazing. I realized later it was mostly because it was played LOUD.

my uncle and aunt had a CD player ca. 1986. i think they eventually had soundtracks for e.g. LA BAMBA and TOP GUN, not to mention barbara streisand records, andrew lloyd webber, etc. i remember listening to their STAND BY ME soundtrack a lot. their oldest son, who would have been born about 1966, only had vinyl and he used to sit me down in front of his collection, give me a pack of C90s, and tell me to dub whatever i wanted. sweet. i got the buzzcocks, lots of reggae records, etc. that way. their middle son was the first young person i knew to have his own CD player; he had one of the first "boom boxes" (or cheap all-in-one stereos, at least) to include a CD player. i remember him having the 3rd english beat album, which i still love. i also remember trying to dub it, by turning on the CD player and the tape deck at the same time. i left for lunch and when i came back i retrieved the cassette. days later when i went to play it, i realized that the CD had been skipping constantly over the same 1-2 second snippet for 45 minutes, so i had some kind of avant-garde minimalist piece on my hands. anyway. boring story.

Not a boring story at all. Well, not by my standards.

My first experience of CD was probably REM's Green, which did sound fantastic because my brother's Arcam/Ruark stereo was leagues better than the 1978 Crown music-centre I was used to.

My first experience of CD in my own home was the first Tindersticks album (yes, I know - the vinyl had an extra track); though I'd been buying CDs for 18 months or so, I was actually taping them at friends' houses as I didn't have playback gear myself. Finally bought a CD player and was completely smitten. Mazzy Star's So Tonight... was the other CD I bought that day.

Am I right in thinking that Brothers In Arms was the first big CD release, the album that started driving consumers towards the new format? I think cassettes were the dominant format for 2-3 years in the late 80s before CDs took over, but I could be wrong. This is from a UK perspective, maybe it was different in the US. My tape deck self-destructed recently so I binned it, and can't really imagine replacing it, which is a shame because I still have about 20 cassettes. Um, maybe Hated In The Nation by GG Allin goes for big bucks on ebay in that format...

My memory is that the change happened relatively quickly. In 1988 my band's was given a CD release as well and none of us had anything to play it on. The record company logic was that little enough stuff was available still, and people with the new tech would buy any old shite, just to have something to play.
I remember distinctly less than 3 years later, in Dublin anyway, it was very difficult to find new releases on vinyl. The megastore had banished them completely. I didn't get a CD player until '93 - a cast off - and the first record i remember buying in the new format was Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, because i couldn't find it on vinyl - Slanted and Enchanted had presented no such problem.

I never particularly liked buying CDs and my level of new music consumption dropped drastically until the early years of this decade as a result.

Awesome infographic, thanks. That graph seems to put the peak of the cassette single at 1998! Totally not what I expected.

I always thought the UK might have been a little behind the US on abandoning cassettes and picking up CDs, since my friends at school were still buying tapes and many of them were unable to listen to CDs until about 1994, but '98 seems pretty late. I remember in '98-'99 the cassette section was pretty much being squeezed out at my local music shops - bought a bunch of tapes cheap, which was cool, except that even 2 years later I never listened to tapes.

(My local Virgin/HMV/Our Price were cutting down their tape sections at that time to make shelf-space for prerecorded MINIDISC albums - not even graphed!)

Regarding western Europe, CD's seemed to become big between 1987-1988. This was also caused by independent labels starting to release their stuff on CD. For example: a metal lover had no reason to buy a cd-player before 1986, as there was hardly anything available to his liking. That all changed in the aforementioned time-period. Around 1990 most stores had switched to selling cd's exclusively. The majority of new releases wasn't made available on vinyl anymore too, around that time.

That all changed in the aforementioned time-period. Around 1990 most stores had switched to selling cd's exclusively.

I can only speak for Finland, but this certainly wasn't the case in here. Up until 1992 or 1993 the stores carried more cassettes than CDs, and even though CDs became more prevalent than cassettes around 1993, most stores still had a cassette section for the next 5 years or so.

Yes, I would have said pretty much the same for the UK. Certainly don't recall CDs outnumbering tapes in 1990, though this was around the time that CDs started to really take hold.

I can only speak for the Netherlands, I guess. Pre-recorded cassettes have never been popular around here. People bought their stuff on vinyl and taped it themselves for use in the car.

Yes, I would have said pretty much the same for the UK. Certainly don't recall CDs outnumbering tapes in 1990, though this was around the time that CDs started to really take hold.

Yeah, my Dad got a CD player in '90 or '91, and while the technology was hardly new then we only knew one other person with one, and I remember the racks being fairly limited (maybe one aisle to four tape aisles, though this was at a W H Smith, but music was a much bigger part of their business back then IIRC) when I went to buy myself my first CD to play on it.

CDs probably took up the majority of floorspace here in the UK since about '92, and cassettes finally died in the late 90s. Vinyl has been relegated to a small back section (mostly dance 12"s, some horribly overpriced new indie LPs) for as long as I remember.

I was an early CD adopter I guess-- I started buying music on vinyl around 1983 but by 1985 I was only buying CDs. My music-loving older brother, who was a big influence on me, was also a bit of an audiophile, and he said CDs were the only way to go. I never bought music on cassette and have probably only bought 10 or so such tapes in my life to listen to in the car. During the '80s and early '90s, before portable CDs, I would tape my CDs to listen to in the car or on my Walkman. In the late '90s I started buying music on vinyl again, almost always used.

i can remember buying a few mainstream things on vinyl up until the late 80s, even though my family switched to mostly cassette buying sometime in the mid 80s. i can remember buying cassette singles especially into the early 90s, i guess it was Christmas '92 when i got a little shelf system with a CD player on it. and after then i bought only CDs for mainstream music, with vinyl creeping back in around 94 when i discovered punk shows and cheap vinyl shops around my high school. in 97 i started deejaying and the huge percentage of what i buy is vinyl. i do still buy CDs, especially underground releases that are CD only as well as some classic jazz and neo soul things that i might also have on vinyl but want for more convenient listening.

i used cassettes up until 2003 or so since that's what my cars had in them, and i never owned a portable CD player so all my walkman type devices were cassette as well up until then. i was mostly copying CDs and LPs and making mixtapes, though i would raid the used sections at the local Record Exchanges and score ridiculously good shit for $.50-$2 on cassette.

i do recall that when i started working at a mainstream music shop in late 98, new cassettes still had a decent sized section, but they were hidden in the back and very few people every fucked with them. we also sold used CDs, and being in the middle of the college section of town we did a huge business with them at that time.

1. I had forgotten that cassette sales surpassed vinyl sales for about 4-5 years before CD sales did.

2. Amazing the fall of 8-tracks, going from their peak sales to no sales in only 4 years.

Amazing the fall of 8-tracks, going from their peak sales to no sales in only 4 years.

The SDP of audio formats.

It think it's easy to forget about the dominance of cassettes 'cause they were generally along periphery of the shop. I had no idea vinyl profits had completely sputtered by the late 80s, 'cause it took up so much floorspace. That explains why vinyl so suddenly vanished around 1990.

I bought a goodly number of LPs during the vinyl cash out at that time, but the last few new records I could easily procure on LP were "Trompe Le Monde" and "Look Ma, No Head" which were already relegated to a single bin of LPs at my regular record shop. That would have been late 1991. I think they had more space for 7" at that point. I bought mail order for about a year, but by 1993, stopped trying to support LPs. A few years later, in Pittsburgh, I found myself working and living across the street from Jerry's Records, just as he decided to forgo CDs and only deal in his massive backlog of vinyl. Uninterested in contemporary rock at the time, I lived off of his $4 and $5 LPs for a long time. Never liked CDs too much, and was happy MP3s came along to solve all the problems of portability, $17 retail prices, and cracked jewel boxes.

I offer this as an example because no one I knew as a kid bought anything but cassettes. They went into your walkman, they went into the car stereo, and they went into your boombox. In my mind, young people didn't start having CD's until the early 90's. Once I got a stereo with a CD player, I bought a Sony Discman a short while later and that is when my purchases switched over to CD exclusively.

This is exactly my experience. My parents bought their first CD player in 1989 and switched from cassettes to CD-exclusive. Before that, though, the last piece of new vinyl my parents ever bought was the 45 rpm single for Hall & Oates' "Method of Modern Love." My memory's hazy, but 1984-1985 may have been the last time my household was vinyl-exclusive.

I do know that the first tape I ever bought with my own money was Wham!'s Make It Big in '85. Although I bought my first CD in 1990 (the first Michael Penn album), I stuck with cassettes until I got a real job, then would by them intermittently throughout the nineties. Places like Best Buy would stock cassettes until 1998 or 1999 for ridiculously low prices.

The last new cassette I bought: Massive Attack's Mezzanine

My car still has a tape deck, and I play my old tapes all the time.

goddam i thought Display Name was like 40

xpost
Funny how old formats survive in cars - I've just gotten my first car to have a CD player (it's a mere 12 yo) and the boxes of CDs that have been nearly untouched for the past 5 years are out of their box and back in circulation: more than that, CDs are ridiculously cheap in charity shops now, so lots of stuff I wouldn't but at vinyl prices gets a look in.

my first cassette purchase, i think, was "he's the DJ, i'm the rapper"!!

my last, i think, was the motown box set -- "hitsville USA." at one point one of the tapes broke, and i actually convinced the record store to let me have a CD copy and i just paid the difference!

i can never remember whether my first was De La Soul's 'The Magic Number/Buddy' single or the Ghostbusters 2 soundtrack

Remember the "cassette-only bonus track"? The Police's Synchronicity had one, maybe the first I can recall.

When did they invent cassette singles? I don't remember them at all when I was buying 7 inches in the 80s. Did CD singles come after or before?

late 80's for sure.

My stepmother got a CD player in maybe 1985, the first thing I heard on it was Gregorian chants. "Wow, when they stop singing it's like totally silent" was the reaction. I went through a very brief period in 1989 where I bought stuff on cassette because the vinyl was hard to find ( I specifically remember having to do this with Camper Van Beethoven and Public Enemy albums). Then I got involved with a gal who had a CD player, and started buying CDs in 1990. By the time we broke up in 1993 I had more CDs than she did.

When did they invent cassette singles? I don't remember them at all when I was buying 7 inches in the 80s. Did CD singles come after or before?

Good question. I bought my first "cassingles" (The Escape Club's "Wild Wild West" and lol Robert Palmer's cover of "Early in the Morning") in fall '88, but I'm sure they were available earlier. I still bought the occasional 7" (the Bangles' "In Your Room," the Stones' "Mixed Emotions") well into 1989, though.

Fun fact: Roxette's "Listen to Your Heart" was the first single to hit #1 unavailable on vinyl.

My current car only has a tape deck, and I still have about five tapes (including, oddly, Squeeze by Velvet Underground that a friend copied for me).

What's funny is that I haven't really been bothered by this (no long road trips though). It's kind of nice not worrying about track selection or anything. Too much trouble to fast forward or reverse. Me and "Ride Captain Ride" are just enjoying getting to know each other.

Weird trivia that matters to nobody but me: the first two Dustdevils albums sound better (more bass) on cassette than on vinyl. People always compare CD to vinyl, but I'm sure there are other cases where cassette takes the prize.

like this one:

L.A.M.F. - Take the Taste Test

i had "It Takes Two" and "Me Myself & I" on cassingle. so they definitely had them by '88

There were 3-inch CD singles in 1987: They Might Be Giants had one for "Don't Let's Start" (maybe more properly called an EP - it had 4 songs).

Robyn Hitchcock had one for "Balloon Man" circa '88 and I remember owning a Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam one around that time. You may recall the adaptor you had to use to make them fit the CD tray.

"People always compare CD to vinyl, but I'm sure there are other cases where cassette takes the prize."

i still listen to a lot of old metal and rap on tape. i prefer it, actually. i always thought that a lot of 80's rap on tape sounded better than cd or vinyl. (a lot of rap albums from back then - not 12 inch singles - were pressed on the cruddiest vinyl and a lot of rap CDs back then were just put on cd really badly. but that's true of a lot of 80's CDs. so, i guess i should say that i like old rap either as 12 inch single or tape. again, with old metal, a lot of cruddy vinyl used by cheap-ass metal labels. this wasn't a problem with tapes. and they really did often sound better.)

Bryan Adams' "Heat of the Night" b/w "Another Day" was released as a cassette single by A&M Records on March 13, 1987, making it the first to be released in the U.S. after the industry had agreed to introduce the format on a wide scale and to begin phasing out the production of 45-rpm singles. In contrast to the earlier Go-Go's single, which was packaged in a regular cassette box, the Bryan Adams single was issued in a unique outer snap-open soft black plastic case with a red colored cassette shell. This case was not used on later single issues and most companies issued them in the new low-cost cardboard slipcase packaging with only one or two opting for the regular type cassette box.

I thought Bow Wow Wow released the first cassette single? When was that, 1980?

... not in the US though, I imagine

Bow Wow Wow and the Go-Go's "Vacation" were cited, yeah.

Do anyone think it dawned on the record companies that digital storage without a physical product was on the way and the CD was an attempt to go back to the well one last time? or did they seriously believe it would remain a high value 'top- end' kind of thing? it must have been clear that they cost 2p to make and that the copying process wasn't anything like as complex as making a vinyl record, so that, quite soon, folk would be making them at home.

You seem to assuming there that record companies employ people with brains

considering they tried to foist minidisc on us as the CD's successor i doubt it really xp

Do anyone think it dawned on the record companies that digital storage without a physical product was on the way

i don't think they could have forseen this in 1981-82.

considering they tried to foist minidisc on us as the CD's successor i doubt it really

MD (and DCC) surely intended to replace cassette? Or was that just the revisionist line in the late-'90s after MD/DCC had flopped first time round?

Not sure what the state of the art was wrt psychoacoustic compression in 1981-82; I think they were doing clever things with masking codecs on speech but anything usable for music must've seemed a long way away. The processing power required was probably in the realm of yr LOL mainframe.

did they seriously believe it would remain a high value 'top- end' kind of thing?

I've long had this image in my head of the CD being introduced in a boardroom meeting, and a John Hammond/Amhet Ertegun-era oldster saying, "But if each disc is a perfect copy, what prevents anyone from making a perfect copy for themselves?" and being laughed at by the younger executives, who explain that they have to be made in clean rooms by guys in air-tight suits.

Good old Wikipedia:

A derivative technology developed originally for DCC is now being used for filtering beer. Silicon wafers with micrometer scale holes are ideal for separating yeast particles from beer. The beer flows through the silicon wafer leaving the yeast particles behind, which results in a very clear beer. The manufacturing process for the filters was originally developed for the read/write heads of DCC players.

I've long had this image in my head of the CD being introduced in a boardroom meeting, and a John Hammond/Amhet Ertegun-era oldster saying, "But if each disc is a perfect copy, what prevents anyone from making a perfect copy for themselves?" and being laughed at by the younger executives, who explain that they have to be made in clean rooms by guys in air-tight suits.

LOL
Just on the notion of what tech was available at the time - in my mind the first sampling technology (fairlights, the emax), and the first stirrings of digital recording seem contemporary with the introduction of the CD and i know there were lads in studios who foresaw that becoming cheaper and home based. Put it another way;

Bow Wow Wow never released a cassette single. Their first ever release was an old-fashioned 7" vinyl single called "C30 C60 C90 Go!," which was a song about home-taping. The group's next release was an 8-song cassette called Your Cassette Pet. That was their only cassette-exclusive production & after that it was back to vinyl (and eventually the Your Cassette Pet tracks were reissued on vinyl).

(and eventually the Your Cassette Pet tracks were reissued on vinyl).

which caused some controversy, as mclaren had promised otherwise -- as if mclaren was ever one to keep a promise/be consistent.

"Do anyone think it dawned on the record companies that digital storage without a physical product was on the way"

i think if they did see it coming, they wouldnt have persevered with cds, considering how easy it is to rip cds to mp3s and fileshare them.

they should have stuck with vinyl basically.

Re: Bow Wow Wow, McLaren may have been free of the group by then. I'm thinking he was gone from "I Want Candy" on... The Cassette Pet tracks came out on vinyl a couple of months after "Candy."

1979-1985 - Vinyl LPs and 45s. It really started to give me a complex when a brand new record would still have excruciating pops and clicks on our crappy Montgomery Ward stereo. It seriously gave me a nervous tick. When I play CDs of albums I had 30 years ago, I still cringe at the place where the vinyl used to skip.

1985-1988 - The era of walkmens and boomboxes/mini stereos with double cassette decks, woo hoo! Does anyone remember the particular smell of the new clear cassettes? If I were to smell it today, it would give me a Smiths/Cure/New Order flashback. I continued to buy boxes of blank cassettes until about 1998, when I got a CD burner.

1988 - Bought my first CD player, hooked up to my mini stereo. It sounded way better than the cassettes with their muddy noise reduction. First CDs were Joy Division - Substance and Dukes of Stratosphear comp.

1994 - I read an article that solid state technology was the future of music storage. If I had money to invest in chip manufacturers, I would have. 2009 we supposedly will finally have high-capacity 2TB SDXC cards, though it might not be 'til 2010 for that much storage.

Vinyl in 2009, LOL.

I continued to buy used vinyl for my radio show because a lot of stuff wasn't available on CD yet. I also bought some indie 45s, a good way to sample bands. My turntable broke around 1997 and I didn't bother getting another.

i love when i buy old vhs tapes and they have store stickers that say: suggested retail price: $89.99 your price: $69.99

THOSE were the days.

i can't believe i was actually buying laserdiscs in the early 90's! what was i thinking?

i'm really glad i had no money in the 90s

I actually really liked minidisc. It's sort of academic now, but it was a fun format. I miss buying vintage wooden cream cheese containers on eBay (which held minidiscs perfectly). Xpost.

those who record gigs still use minidisc, so until something better comes along to replace it then it will still have that niche market.

I picked up a HI-MD minidisc two years ago, and its great for digitizing LPs. There's something about having real buttons to start and stop recording that makes it a lot easyier than trying to input it to a computer. And you can walk around playing that LP side while doing chores, and split up the tracks and mark the titles. No fiddling with WAV editors, etc.

Started listening to bought music in 1992, this was all on tape bar my Mum & Dad's vinyl copy of ABBA: The Album. Saved up and bought a CD/tape boombox (with two tape decks of course) about a year or so later, first purchase being Now! 23 which I bought in a bargain bin the same day. Bought a mixture of CDs and tapes throughout the '90s (mostly the former), some singles on vinyl too. Anyone else remember the brief mid-'90s trend for £4.99 new cassette albums (Ash's 1977 and the self-titled Charlatans album, both of which my brother bought)? I carried on using cassettes for copying other peoples' CDs/vinyl through uni though, this was up to about 2002. I don't think I've got any tapes left, there was a box at my parents' house but I think I threw them all away...

Clear enough that in the UK/Ireland it was the cassette that killed vinyl, not the CD. Seems if you were born anytime after 1970, you were unilikely to have had the money or the equipment to support a vinyl habit as a kid, and so went straight to cassette and from there to Cd after school/ college

"Do anyone think it dawned on the record companies that digital storage without a physical product was on the way"

i think if they did see it coming, they wouldnt have persevered with cds, considering how easy it is to rip cds to mp3s and fileshare them.

CDs came out in the late 70s, before the IBM-compatible PC was even introduced (with its 640K max of RAM, and 360K floppy disc or cassette storage), so the idea that home production of 700 MB recordings was just around the corner is not valid (Moore's law be damned!). The record companies invented themselves 20+ years of raking in heretofore undreamed-of money; they did the right thing, businesswise.

Anyone else remember the brief mid-'90s trend for £4.99 new cassette albums (Ash's 1977 and the self-titled Charlatans album, both of which my brother bought)?

I had the Ash tape at £4.99! Only reason I bought the album was it was so cheap.

Am I right in thinking that Brothers In Arms was the first big CD release, the album that started driving consumers towards the new format?

Yeah, I remember reading back around 1985 or early '86 that Dire Straits were, at that point, the bestselling CD artists in the brief history of the format - not just "Brothers", but their entire back catalog.

The record companies invented themselves 20+ years of raking in heretofore undreamed-of money; they did the right thing, businesswise.

Guess that's true. if you look at the NYT graphic above, peak year for Cds ('99) was worth double the peak year for Vinyl ('78) - still though, the world was richer, there were whole new parts of the world that weren't markets in '78 opened up..... I guess i'm wondering if the growth had much to do with the medium? (it was cheaper to make, cheaper to ship and store etc.)

I think that graphic is from RIAA data, so they're American stats. And it's based on profit, not units sold.

I didn't get a cd player until about 1989, and even then I bought a large amount of vinyl. I never bought many tapes because I'd heard people thought vinyl sounded better though how much better it sounded on the shitty stereo I had from Montgomery Wards was debatable.

The only stand-alone CD player I've owned is a Sony Discman earned through Camel Cash. Thank you Joe!

i love when i buy old vhs tapes and they have store stickers that say: suggested retail price: $89.99 your price: $69.99

― scott seward

^^^lol i remember this well, you'd see the release calendar for vhs tapes and the retail price for the dead pool was $100 or something

They still do this on Half.com. You search for like an old New Yorker video and it'll say list price $99.99 and then you'll save $49.99 cause somebody in Debuque is fool fishing.

I got my first CD player in 1985, and I bought a portable "car" model (supposed to be more shock-resistant) a few years after. I ended up not using the portable one in my car because leaving the $200 player and a stack of CDs in there seemed like a bad idea, so when the home deck died I hooked up the portable, and I'm still using it.

I don't remember when I switched from vinyl to CDs, probably when the price differential wasn't that much. I pretty much wouldn't dream of buying vinyl today unless it's a cheap, used LP, of something I'm kind of interested in. (Last purchases: 4 jazz LPs for $3, and before that the 2 Mick Ronson LPs for $1 each.)

Does anyone remember the particular smell of the new clear cassettes? If I were to smell it today, it would give me a Smiths/Cure/New Order flashback.

Yes, yes, a thousand time yes! I miss that smell, vinyl doesn't have that weird chemical printing plant smell. I love the smell of offset print barely given enough time to dry and then shrink wrapped in a very tight package. It is one of my favorite childhood smells.

mine was gasoline

I can remember the peculiar smell of my brother's tape recorder - one of those models with the big chunky keys, like the Philips EL series but not quite the same. He got it for Xmas in 1971 or 1972. I think the smell was actually the power supply in the thing overheating and cooking the cassettes slightly.

CDs came out in the late 70s, before the IBM-compatible PC was even introduced (with its 640K max of RAM, and 360K floppy disc or cassette storage), so the idea that home production of 700 MB recordings was just around the corner is not valid (Moore's law be damned!). The record companies invented themselves 20+ years of raking in heretofore undreamed-of money; they did the right thing, businesswise.

Not to mention the fact that the internet as we know it didn't exist in the late seventies/early eighties.

I quit buying CDs regularly after having my car windows smashed on New Years Eve 2002 and both of my giant books of CDs stolen. It sucked cos not only did I lose all my store-bought CDs but I was into collecting expensive Japanese Shibuya-kei and also had a sizable collection of my friends' music on CDr. Everything store-bought was replaced via Soulseek cos I think I sat down and calculated how much it would cost to buy it all over again and it was like over 5k or something.

I did learn to never leave anything visible/of value in my car again.