Comprising six-inch by inch casings of cardboard and plastic, the so-called longbox packaging was several times bigger than necessary. The design was, in part, an effort to make it easier to flip through discs on shelving units designed for LPs, but it was also aimed at theft prevention. Longbox packaging was estimated to be responsible for creating Eventually, the keepers would go away and leave only the cellophane-wrapped jewel cases we think of today with magnetized security sticker attached.
As the first readily available way to share digital music without actually paying for it , the CD-R was in many ways a steppingstone to the end of CD dominance. Sure, you had to spool through dozens of artists while idling your car to find the tune you were after, but suddenly music was free, and it was almost everywhere.
In , just as millennials and the internet itself were coming of age, Napster hit the web and changed the world forever. Allowing a network of global users to easily share music files, the site boomed as the Recording Industry Association of America RIAA and other major industry organizations scrambled to catch up and fetch their high-dollar lawyers.
At its height, Napster hosted around 80 million users , and paved the way for other peer-to-peer sites like LimeWire, uTorrent, and many more. While Napster was eventually shuttered in , the genie was out of the bottle, so to speak, and the piles of cash that CD sales had hauled in began to slowly but surely fade away.
Perhaps just as striking, iTunes sales became a musical powerhouse for Apple, engorging its coffers and changing the way people purchased music — for those who still did pay for it. In , iTunes outpaced CD sales in two major physical stores for the first time. But the modest victory would be short-lived. The first major on-demand service, Spotify, came eight years later, and together, the two companies helped rewrite the music playbook. In , streaming revenue eclipsed CD sales for the first time, and did the same for digital downloads in In September , they demonstrated an optical digital audio disc with a minute playing time, and with specifications of 44, Hz sampling rate, bit linear resolution, cross-interleaved error correction code, that were similar to those of the Compact Disc introduced in In August the real pressing was ready to begin in the new factory, not far from the place where Emil Berliner had produced his first gramophone record 93 years earlier.
By now, Deutsche Grammophon, Berliner's company and the publisher of the Strauss recording, had become a part of PolyGram. This event is often seen as the "Big Bang" of the digital audio revolution. The new audio disc was enthusiastically received, especially in the early-adopting classical music and audiophile communities and its handling quality received particular praise. Thus, a new deal was forged, and the two companies worked together for the next few years.
Engineers at Philips concentrated on the physical design of the disc: how the laser would read off the information from the pits and lands on the disc surface. In the year , Philips and Sony, in general acceptance of certain specifications regarding the CDs, brought out the Red Book. The name was attributed to the colour of the cover of the first publication. The Red Book contained specifications that included the size of the disc, the recording details, the sampling, and other standards, many of which remain unchanged even today.
The CDs could be played in stereo systems, had a diameter of mm making it portable and smaller than the vinyl record , and could hold an immense amount of data, much more than the vinyl record or the cassette did.
Soon after, Sony and Philips parted ways and started working separately, trying to produce their own CD-drive equipment. The first commercial CD drive was released a month earlier by Sony on 1st of October , making it a notable event in the history of CD development.
It did not reach the shores of America until the early part of Sony beat Philips once again for a second time when it released the first portable CD player in the year The time was ripe for commercial CDs to make a foray into the market. In spite of the concerns of the major music labels, the popularity of CDs soared and over a thousand different singles and albums were released in the first year alone. The second book of standards was once again a collaborative effort of the two companies in spite of the fact that both of them were still on the race separately.
The electronics of the CD could be tweaked in a manner such that one would be able to store data on the disc that could be read off by a computer. This was a landmark development in the history of CDs that had far-reaching effects. CDs would prove to be an ideal replacement for the existing floppy discs and would store a large amount of data in spite of their size.
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