What year were CDs first released?
I can still vividly remember the first CD I was ever gifted. Well, it may not have been the first, but these grand statements are always reserved for emotional celebrity interviews who attribute their success to one childhood memory. Ultimately, my memory is pretty fuzzy, but this one day sticks out more than others. After spending my infancy dancing around to his Stevie Wonder greatest hits compilation, my uncle decided to gift me a copy of his 2005 A Time To Love album.
Sure, it wasn’t his most memorable work in the grand scheme of things. But it remains a special album to me. I was nine years old, and it was the first album I had for my own, an album I had the responsibility of keeping safe, an album that I could read the liner notes of for hours, uninterrupted by the thieving hands of my brother.
It’s this very feeling that has sparked what flimsy critics call ‘the vinyl revival’. But that label seems to imply that the returning increase in physical copy sales in the last decade is nothing more than a fad, a trend for teenagers to hop on in pursuit of inauthentic performatism. But it’s more than that. We want that physical copy to experience all the feelings I just mentioned.
Because don’t let streaming culture fool you, beneath that are seas of fans who genuinely care about the art and artists we support, and not only do we want to show it by financially backing them, we want a chance to consume their art as purely and as unfiltered as possible. On Spotify, you can’t truly listen to how the A-side ends before turning it to embark on the second half.
Because of the monstrous impact streaming has had on society, even CDs are now treasured commodities. There was once a time when the introduction of the CD felt dangerous, like the final nail in the coffin for traditionalism and the beginning of a worrying modern future. Can you blame those cynics? Look at us now, paying artists mere pennies for the convenience of digitalising their product.
Those fears came during a decade when all worries about modernisation were manifesting themselves: the brave future-obsessed 1980s. In that decade, synthesisers were soundtracking a grand age of entertainment where cinema and TV budgets were inflated and stories of flying cars in the future were told aplenty. So it was high time for a brave new invention, and the CD satiated that hunger.
While 1979 brought the first prototype of a CD to a select group in Europe and Japan, it wasn’t until the turn of the decade that companies Philips and Sony joined forces to bring the next product of the future. And then in 1982, CDs became officially available to the public.
What album was on the first ever CD?
Okay, so there might be a reason your childhood was spent listening to your parents dance to Abba in the kitchen, because their record The Visitors is reported to be the first ever album pressed onto CD. By 1982, it was the band’s eighth studio album, and their greatest drunken dancefloor hits were already behind them, so it may have been purchased pretty swiftly in 1982, but most likely shelved when their remaining discography was finally shelved.
The Eagles’ Greatest Hits album takes the top spot for the biggest-selling CD of all time, clocking in at over 38million copies. Unless there is a similar revival for CD in the coming decades, it’s unlikely that it will be topped as it’s rumoured that CD sales have dropped by 10m each year since 2008.
