The first CD to sell one million copies
The public’s perception of music has always stemmed from the medium that they encounter it in. As many people may love the idea of albums in the modern age, it’s a very different experience having the vinyl in front of someone rather than listening to a band’s entire back catalogue with just a few clicks on Spotify. While vinyl may have been applauded in its time for its warm sound, the advent of the CD led to artists completely restructuring their model.
Now that everything was put onto a compact disc, the wiggle room for musicians broadened a lot more now that they didn’t have to worry about the album length. For as many great albums that may have been released during the 1970s, the length commonly became a problem when discussing the mechanics of the medium.
Since everything is pressed on the vinyl record, most big-name artists would try to keep their albums around a specific timeframe to optimise the mix’s sound. Although an LP like Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, for instance, had immaculate production from cover to cover, the band needed to lose the song ‘Silver Springs’ for the rest of the band to be heard in the final mix of the album.
After being introduced in the 1980s, bands started taking advantage of what the CD offered. With more extended time to work with, groups began stretching their songs out longer than they initially could, with classics like Hysteria by Def Leppard selling in droves with a runtime of over an hour.
Of all the albums that benefited from the longer tracklistings, no other artist made off quite as well as Dire Straits. After being known as one of the premiere bands of the time, Mark Knopfler was just getting started working his magic when he began working on the album Brothers in Arms. Boasting the title track, ‘Money for Nothing’, and ‘Walk of Life’, the album would become one of the most celebrated rock records of the era and would prove pivotal to the CD medium.
After expanding the length of the tracks to suit the running length of the CD, the album would become the first CD to sell upwards of a million copies worldwide, going on to notch up 250,000 just in Britain. Considering the longer runtimes of the different songs, the audience also got to see the band in their natural habitat, jamming for the sake of jamming and rarely missing a beat along the way.
As the 1980s were dawning, Knopfler also opened new doors thanks to his stellar guitar work on the record. Compared to the ramshackle playing that he could get up to whenever he strapped on his guitar, Knopfler was responsible for putting together some of the greatest tracks of other stars in the 1980s, lending his skills to tracks by Bob Dylan for the album Slow Train Coming and even penning a few tunes with Tina Turner for her album Private Dancer.
Although Dire Straits could have easily ridden the wave of the vinyl era for years, the CD version of Brothers in Arms showed them as nature intended. Regardless of how many artists may have watered down their CDs with filler material, Knopfler knew that more wiggle room meant more sonic territory to explore.
