The compact disc (CD) was developed simultaneously by Royal Philips and Sony in the late 1970s and then was introduced to the public in 1982.¹ In creating the CD, the companies wanted to provide consumers with a product that could hold more minutes of listening time compared to the cassette.² What set the CD apart from something like the record or the cassette was that it used the concept of having groves that you would find on a vinyl record or tape, but developers reduced the size and digitized the groves using Pulse Code Modulation (PCM).³ Sony also released the first ever CD player, contributing to it being the most successful audio technology by the 1990s.⁴

The CD rivaled the cassette in the height of the cassettes popularity with the introduction of the Walkman, also in the late 1970s. The CD had the characteristics people loved about the cassette: it was portable, simple to use, and allowed users to have more control over their listening experience. In addition to this, the CD had a better, more clear sound and was able to maintain it’s original quality longer than the cassette or record.⁵ CDs became a major money maker for these corporations, becoming more very popular, but seeing as cassette sales still remained largely successful throughout the 1980s and 90s⁶, they ultimately didn’t replace the cassette entirely.

1. James Hill. “A Brief History of Music Formats.” UnifiedManufacturing. January 16, 2022. https://www.unifiedmanufacturing.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-music-formats/. ↩︎
2. Howie Singer, and Bill Rosenblatt. “Compact Discs.” In Key Changes. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197656891.003.0007. ↩︎
3. Howie Singer, and Bill Rosenblatt. “Compact Discs.” In Key Changes. ↩︎
4. Howie Singer, and Bill Rosenblatt. “Compact Discs.” In Key Changes. ↩︎
5. Howie Singer, and Bill Rosenblatt. “Compact Discs.” In Key Changes. ↩︎
6. Refer to Success of the Cassette: The Walkman ↩︎