The CD Turns 40 Years Old

Written by on August 17, 2022

Do you remember ripping CDs? Or having an entire encyclopedia-sized CD case in your car? When you couldn’t stream a song so you had to buy the entire CD or make a mix CD? The CD skipping because it got scratched? Anyway, enough reminiscing…

The Compact Disc turns 40 years old today, feel old yet? On August 17, 1982, Royal Philips Electronics made the first CD. By 1985 2,600 titles were available on CD. By the 1990s, CDs had taken the place of vinyl and cassette tapes in the music industry. In the 2000s, CD sales were the highest.

Vinyl sales have been on the rise and Colorado, statistically, is the state to love vinyl the most. However, CD sales were actually back up for the first time in 20 years last year, in 2021! Pretty wild.

 

 

Check out the graph below from RIAA showing music sales by format over the years:

Source: RIAA

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