Few realized it at the time, but the seeds of the industry’s collapse were contained in the digital underpinning of the new format. CDs are rendered in the binary logic of 0s and 1s, just like computer code, and this modality makes for easy replication.
The peak of CD buying came a century after the first mass-produced wax cylinder. This coincided with the rise of personal computers equipped with a CD drive and an MP3 application like iTunes. Recordable CDs had been around a while, but now anyone could rip, and burn, the music on their expensive CDs with no loss of sound quality and share it with others. Game over.
My own career as a musician was launched right at that moment. My jazz trio the Bad Plus signed to Columbia Records in 2002, and our debut disc, These Are the Vistas, sold 100,000 copies in the United States alone. (This was a surprisingly large number for an avant-garde instrumental outfit, and probably a matter of luck as much as anything else.) In retrospect, this was the last gasp of the old system; fans told us they burned our 2004 sophomore effort, Give, for their friends. Seemingly overnight, and perhaps for the first time ever, record companies were making substantially less money. Panicked, Columbia attached copyright software, known as XCP, to a raft of 2005 releases, including our third album, Suspicious Activity? Unfortunately, the software contained a digital back door that could be exploited by nefarious hackers. Grimly, we told our fans not to buy our record until this digital rights violation was sorted out, and our contract with Columbia expired.
Burning CDs was just the beginning of that era’s complete system failure. Binary code had invaded our society via the Internet, and soon file sharing was everywhere, followed by the streaming services. The first culprit, Napster, reared its head in 1999, but the record industry managed to shut it down for copyright infringement in 2001. (The year before, the rock band Metallica had stepped up and sued Napster, taking the hit of attendant bad publicity for suggesting that their fans should actually buy their music.) It wasn’t going to stop with Napster, of course. YouTube started in 2005, the same year Pandora radio exploded; Tower Records, the mainstay brick-and-mortar store for music mavens, folded in 2006. After various arguments, everyone simply gave up and let Spotify enter the American market in 2011. The Manhattan brick-and-mortar chain J&R held on until 2014, but since its final location pulled down the shutters, there hasn’t really been a store in New York City where one could browse all the important new releases in jazz, classical, and pop. If you aren’t online, you’re out of luck.