Is the Record Album Dead? Not by a Long Shot.Written by Charles Essmeier
In 1982, Sony and Philips introduced compact disc, a digital music playback format that used a laser to read disc. The compact disc was expected to quickly replace long play record album (LP) that Columbia had introduced in 1949. The product took off quickly, even at a retail price that was nearly double that of a record album, and sales of record albums plummeted. The CD, as compact discs quickly became known, offered what audio magazines called “perfect sound forever” while offering immunity to effects of wear and tear that often left records noisy. The record companies reduced price of manufacture through improved production methods, and cost of manufacturing a CD soon fell below that of manufacturing a record. Even so, compact discs continued to sell well at higher price, making CD quite a profitable product, indeed.
In order to maximize their profits, record companies decided to phase out phonograph record. They told their retailers that they would no longer accept returns on defective albums. This caused many retailers to stop stocking records altogether, and record album had more or less disappeared from market by 1990. And then something strange happened. The record began to make a comeback. Sparked by a few artists that demanded that
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