Requiem for a Beam

The CD era was like no other time in the history of widgets, a 30-year iceberg that surfaced in October of 1982. On this inaugural day, either Billy Joel’s 52nd Street or an album of Chopin waltzes played by Claudio Arrau (depending how you count) became the first commercially available CD. At its peak, in 2002, CDs held 95.7 percent of the market share, while competing with both vinyl and cassettes. In 1990, the cassette was the most popular format, but the CD had pulled ahead by 1999. That was it, for almost 20 years. Vinyl barely existed in the 1990s. Now, physical objects are an incidental presence in the music business. In 2023, the CD market share was below three percent, less than half of vinyl’s eight percent.

Watching the CD be introduced, sell like crazy, and then fade from stores made the industry averse to a particular kind of commodity swindle. Asking listeners to buy their libraries a second time while getting them to invest in new hardware was a gold rush hustle you can’t pull off twice—and labels didn’t try: everyone already has a phone. But it was a world historical scam. The commercial expression of empire, a plastic trace of an historical formation, CDs were more profitable and popular than any previous format of recorded music. The cost of manufacturing a CD has hovered between one and two dollars for years—my friend, lawyer and former manager Roger Cramer, has the figure $1.17 stuck in his head from the ’90s—while a standard vinyl LP can cost anywhere between $2 and umptillion dollars to produce. (It is important to note that list prices for vinyl have shot way up to account for this and it is common to see a new LP listing for $30 or more.) 

Vinyl collections were common by the 1990s, even for casual listeners, and band shirts were not ironic or coded. These visual cues meant what they appeared to mean: this subject has a relation to this event. CDs amplified these variables by subjecting them to an economic boom, bringing these objects closer to omnipresence. CDs were durable enough to show up in restaurant kitchens, on the floors of pickup trucks, in piles everywhere. Steve Albini spelled it out on the back of The Rich Man’s Eight-Track Tape, a 1987 CD collection of previously released Big Black albums: “Compact discs are quite durable, this being their only advantage over real music media. You should take every opportunity to scratch them, fingerprint them, and eat egg and bacon sandwiches off them. Don’t worry about their longevity, as Philips will pronounce them obsolete when the next phase of the market-squeezing technology bonanza begins.” It wasn’t Philips who ended up making the call but that’s what happened.