1792: "The Compact Disc Era"

0:00For about 20 years, the compact disc was how millions of people built a music collection. But when the CD arrived in 1982, even the company is developing it, couldn't know just how completely it would replace what came before it, or how quickly something else would eventually replace the CD. Sony and Phillips jointly developed the format, settling on a disc 12 centimeters or 4.7 inches, with 16-bit digital audio sampled at 44.1 kilohertz. On October 1st, 1982, Sony launched the CDP 101, the first commercial CD player in Japan for 168,000 yen. It arrived alongside 50 albums released on CD by CBS Sony. Billy Joel's 52nd Street was among them. The advantages, they were obvious. Unlike a record, there was no needle touching the music. And unlike a cassette, there was no tape to rewind, stretch, or get eaten by the machine.

1:04A laser-red microscopic pits encoded into the disc, and listeners could jump directly from track 2 to track 9 with the push of a button. At first, the hardware was expensive, and the music selection very limited. And then, prices fell, catalogues expanded, and CD players moved into homes, portable players, and especially cars. By 1992, CDs were outselling cassette tapes in the United States, and then came the peak. In 2000, Americans bought 943 million CDs, generating more than $13 billion in the United States and recorded music revenue. But something else had already changed. Music itself no longer needed the compact disc. MP3s could travel across the internet, file sharing demonstrated that enormous music libraries could exist without shelves of plastic cases. Legal downloads followed, and eventually streaming removed even the need to own the digital

2:07file. You can see the change directly inside your car. For years, a CD player was expected equipment. First in the dashboard, and later as part of the integrated entertainment system. And today, many new vehicles don't offer one at all. USB boards, Bluetooth smartphones, Apple CarPlay, and Android Auto, they've taken its place. The little slot in the dashboard simply disappeared. The compact disc helped teach an entire generation to expect music digitally, and eventually, digital music outcrew the disc. These are interesting things with JZ.