Philips Unveils Compact Disc: Music Goes Digital

Philips engineers in Eindhoven, Netherlands, demonstrated a prototype Compact Disc to the press on March 8, 1979, holding up a small, shiny plastic disc and playing music from it using a laser beam. The audience was skeptical. The audio quality was impressive, but the consumer electronics industry had seen promising formats fail before, and vinyl records had been the standard for nearly a century. Within five years, the CD would begin killing vinyl. Within twenty-five years, digital downloads would begin killing the CD. The development of the Compact Disc began at Philips in 1974 under a team led by physicist Klaas Compaan and engineer Piet Kramer. They experimented with storing audio data as a series of microscopic pits on a reflective disc, read by a focused laser beam. The laser approach eliminated physical contact between the playback mechanism and the recording surface, solving the wear problem that degraded analog records and tapes over repeated plays. Philips partnered with Sony in 1979 to establish a unified standard, a collaboration driven by Philips' Joop Sinjou and Sony's Toshitada Doi. The two companies had competing prototypes — Philips favored a 115mm disc, Sony a 120mm version — and the final 120mm diameter was reportedly chosen to accommodate a complete recording of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony at 74 minutes, though the story may be apocryphal. The technical standard, known as the Red Book, was published in 1980. The first commercial CD, Billy Joel's 52nd Street, was released in Japan on October 1, 1982, alongside the Sony CDP-101, the world's first consumer CD player, priced at roughly $900. Early adoption was slow due to the cost of players, but prices dropped steadily, and the CD's advantages — no scratching, no hiss, no warping — won consumers over. By 1988, CD sales surpassed vinyl. By 1991, they surpassed cassette tapes. Global CD sales peaked in 2000 at approximately 2.4 billion units. The introduction of the MP3 format and Apple's iTunes in 2001 began a decline that reduced physical music sales by over 50 percent within a decade. The Compact Disc transformed not just music but data storage, spawning CD-ROM, DVD, and Blu-ray formats that carried the laser-read optical disc principle into computing, film, and gaming.