September 15, 2022 – CDs

Happy Throwback Thursday! Today we’re featuring the year 1982, and that’s the year that CDs were first introduced! CDs were developed in a partnership between Sony and Philips, and the first one was manufactured in August 1982. During development, Philips threw around a few names before settling on “compact disc”. Other names included MiniRack, MiniDisc, and CompactRack. They decided to go with “compact disc” hoping to capitalize on the success of the compact cassette.
1982 was also the year the first commercially available CD player first went on sale. It cost up to $1000, but despite the hefty price tag, more than 400,000 were sold between 1983 and 1984. By 1988, CD sales surpassed vinyl for the first time, and sales eclipsed cassettes by 1991. By 2007, more than 200 billion CDs had been sold worldwide.
The first mass-produced CD was ABBA’s The Visitors. But the first album released to the public on CD was 52nd Street by Billy Joel in October 1982. In 1985, Dire Straits Brothers in Arms became the first CD to sell a million copies. And David Bowie was the first artist to convert his entire catalog to CD, which he did in 1985.
At one time, half of the CDs manufactured had the AOL logo on them. AOL sent out more than a billion CDs with free trials between 1993-2006. The CDs were everywhere – not only were they sent by direct mail, but they were in stores, magazines, and even cereal boxes! It was a successful campaign, as AOL signed up new users at the rate of one every 6 seconds.
Thanks to the rise of iTunes and other streaming services, CD sales fell by 10 million every year since 2008. However, in 2021 CD sales rose for the first time in nearly 20 years! Shipments of CDs increased by 47% in 2021, according to the RIAA. Learn more here.