Happy Birthday - Compact Disc Turns 25

With so much in doubt about the future of the CD it's easy to overlook that on Friday the Compact Disc format will turn 25. In Germany the world's first CD was pressed, belonged to Polygram – the recording company not-so-coincidentally owned by Philips. The first CD to be manufactured at the plant was "The Visitors" by ABBA. Yeah, baby. CDs were introduced on the market in November 1982 with a healthy catalogue of around 150 titles - most of which feel under the category of classical music.

The first CDs and CD players (like the Philips CD100) were introduced in November - at least in Japan. US and European markets received the players slightly later during March of 1983. It took until the 1990s before the format really took over and eclipsed LPs and the wildly popular cassettes that dominated the market. It took about that long for the record industry to truly embrace the format and acknowledge that it was the logical choice for the future.

Currently, the CD seems in a state of necessary decline. Record labels have experimented with adding extras and lowering the wholesale price of CDs, but few have truly dropped prices enough or bothered to grasp the future with two hands. Several opportunities for change have arisen over the years, most notably SACD and DVD-Audio - and now Blu-ray and HD DVD, but industry execs are somewhat reactionary. Instead of guiding the market, they prefer to allow manufacturers lead the way, jumping on the consumer-driven bandwagon once it takes hold (often, in my opinion, years later than if they had provided some sort of leadership.)

One of my favorite stories about the dawn of the Compact Disc centers around one of the few industry moguls to raise his voice against the digital format in its early days. The late Maurice Oberstein, an American who was head of the Polygram UK (later Universal) label, said at an industry event "Do you realise we are giving away our master tapes here?" At the time, everybody was too busy counting the cash to listen. Now, with some of the issues surrounding file sharing and music downloads the industry is realizing that perhaps it shoudl have been paying more attention.

In the end, we hope that the shift away from the Compact Disc results in an awakening of the industry - and awakening to more innovation. This woudl be a nice contrast to the reactionary panic and lawyer-infested lawsuit responses we've seen inflicted on consumers as they reel from the realization that it is no longer 1982 and the world has moved on.

Let's hope for the best and see what the future brings.