Public Servant Lifestyle

The humble audio Compact Disc (CD) celebrated its 25th birthday this August.

"The UK recording industry has moved very quickly to expand beyond its traditional base of physical sales to generate additional revenues from multi-platform music licensing...Consumers vote with their pay packets and 58 million CD album sales in just six months is a very significant number indeed...we are still selling 32% more CDs than 10 years ago." - British Phonographic Institute (BPI) Chief Executive Geoff Taylor (July 2007).

Third Decade

1982 was the year that the humble audio CD was born. It was on August 17 of that year that PolyGram produced the world's first mass-produced audio CD containing classical music: Claudio Arrau's rendition on the piano of various waltzes by Frederic Chopin. The first pop music CD by the same producer was ABBA's massive album The Visitors. Starting with 376,000 of the soon-to-be familiar 'silver discs' in the first year, Universal Music - the successor to PolyGram - has now produced well in excess of 1.8 billion CDs.

Bayer developed the technology for compact discs together with Philips and PolyGram. A customised Makrolon(R) polycarbonate was the plastic starting material, which to this day - having been modified a number of times - acts as a base material for many electronic storage media.

In 1982, Sony introduced the first CD player in Japan. The world's very first audio CD release was Billy Joel's album 52nd Street (Sony Music). From there the format took off as soon as it was launched: in the USA alone 30,000 CD players and 800,000 music CDs were sold in the first year.

'The Red Book'

Philips and Sony worked almost simultaneously and initially independently on their own CD projects. Both companies started off with their own individual development programs, but finally agreed upon a common CD standard, which stipulates norms and specifications on data storage, error correction, etc., in the so-called 'Red Book' – which established a world standard for audio CDs. This agreement enabled every subsequent CD player and every CD-ROM drive to be able to play any audio CD.

The Ninth Symphony

Philips originally suggested that a compact disc should have a diameter of 11.5 centimetres and a playing time of 60 minutes. In this regard, the internet provides us with different stories that have one thing in common: the aim of getting The Ninth Symphony by Beethoven, one of the longest compositions with a playing time of 74 minutes, completely onto one audio CD. According to one story – which may be apocryphal - the world-famous conductor Herbert von Karajan, whose concert recording appeared at that time on the PolyGram label, demanded that Philips introduce a CD with a sufficient playing time for his favourite piece. Another version says that the wife of the then-chairman and founder of Sony, Akio Morita urged her husband to exercise his influence so that Beethoven could be appropriately honoured. Whichever story is true, a diameter of 12 centimetres was agreed upon, which made it possible to achieve a playing time of 74 minutes. Later came the CD single with a diameter of eight centimetres and a possible playing time of 21 minutes.

The CD-ROM - a Miniature Library

It quickly became clear that this new format was suitable for far more than just music recordings: in 1992, 10 years after the audio CD, the CD-ROM - Read Only Memory - came onto the market, a format that once recorded on could not be changed. With a capacity of 650 megabytes, the arrival of the CD-ROM provided the storage capacity of more than 450 floppy discs. As a result, the CD-ROM revolutionised portable storage medium and has remained the single most cost-effective medium for storing and reproducing software programs, games, databases and reference works.

Philips and Sony further developed the 'Red Book' format for these new application areas. This resulted in the publication of the so-called 'Yellow Book' specification in 1984. This standard governed the direct access to individual sectors of the CD. Because computer data is much more sensitive to damage than the data on music CDs, a technology was established that reserved part of the storage space for error correction. This guaranteed a high degree of data integrity.

DVD to DVD-R

The development of these small round silver discs progressed quickly: from the recordable CD-R to the DVD (Digital Versatile Disc) and the recordable DVD-R - optical storage media with even greater storage capacity are coming onto the market.

The development of the CD market far exceeded even the wildest expectations of 1982, the figures speak for themselves:

1. During the past 10 years, the market has seen average annual growth of around 30%.

2. In 2001, around 25 billion CDs were produced worldwide - if these were piled on top of one another, the resulting tower would be 30,000 kilometres high.

3. The new generation of CDs in the form of recordable or rewritable CD-R’s and CD-RW’s, as well as the Digital Versatile Disc, or DVD for short, that represents the new era of digital video recording, are also gaining in importance.

4. Nobody could have predicted the rapid growth in this market sector: while approximately 20 million CDs were produced in 1984, production figures had already reached approximately 5.5 billion by 1995, corresponding to approximately 100,000 metric tons of polycarbonate. This was followed by a boom in the market, which saw a 30% annual growth rate, resulting in approximately 25 billion discs in 2001 (equating to 430,000 metric tons of material).

5. The total figure for global production of optical data storage media from the early days in 1982 up to and including 2001 comes to more than 110 billion units.

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