CDs are making a comeback. Here's how we got to know them almost 40 years ago | CBC (2024)

CBC Archives

· Posted: Jul 07, 2022 2:11 PM EDT | Last Updated: July 7, 2022

Don't kick those CD towers to the curb just yet. You may still need them for storage.

Declaring CDs dead is tempting, given consistently declining sales over the past several years. In March, the Recording Industry Association of America released its year-end revenue report, which showed that almost one billion units of the shiny medium were sold in the U.S. in 2000, compared to just 46.6 million in 2021.

But 2021 also saw a nearly 50 per cent jump in sales from the previous year, making it the first time CD sales had increased since 2004.

In June 2022, a headline on Billboard.com boldly proclaimed that CDs are back. The music industry watcher highlighted how both BTS and Beyoncé have "hopped on the seemingly retro trend" of releasing their latest albums on CD.Tech review website Engadget described the CD revival as "inevitable".

• CBC ARCHIVES When CDs made vinyl obsolete ... and how it came back

Music consumers have heard the retro revival song before.

In 1988, CBC reporter Kathy Kastner said it was "just a matter of time before the vinyl record breathes its last gasp." Decades later, the medium experienced a resurrection. The Associated Press reported last month that manufacturing plants in the U.S. are backlogged by six to eight months trying to meet demand.

Given the CD's long decline in the 2000s, younger millennials and some members of Gen Z "may not be as familiar with CDs and especially CD players," noted Billboard.com.

Any technology, whether it's truly new or not yet familiar to users, takes getting used to. Here's how music consumers in the '80s adopted a new format.

'Will it replace your stereo?'

The first time compact discs were mentioned on CBC-TV was almost 40 years ago, according to the TV catalog. In October 1982, CBC's Marketplace introduced viewers to the compact disc at the Chicago Electronics Show.

Less than three years later, CD players caught the attention of CBC's Midday on Sept. 12, 1985. Consumer reporter Kathryn O'Hara showed viewers a disc and a portable CD player, and then explained the device's benefits.

"The technology is becoming more and more refined so that you can have it for multiple uses," she said. "Will it replace your stereo? Not for a while, I don't think."

25 million CDs each year

In June 1986, CBC reporter Stu Paterson visited Praxis Technologies, a CD manufacturing plant in Mississauga, Ont.

As a worker clad in a protective uniform and rubber gloves operated a machine, Paterson said Praxis planned to produce 25 million music discs per year and create 150 jobs. CDs storing information would come later, he added.

As for the old-fashioned LP, Paterson said, their share of the music market had fallen behind CDs and cassettes. Some "CD boosters" were predicting that record sales could fall to five per cent of the audio market within six years and be declared "history" soon after that.

"That's premature," said an unidentified representative from CBS Records, whose factory in North York, Ont., continued to churn out vinyl records. "There are eight million record players in Canada," he said. "And the record industry is certainly going to cater to those for the next several years."

According to the Globe and Mail, the CBS Records factory in Toronto stopped producing vinyl records in August 1988.