13-05-2025
Brothers In Arms and the Compact Disc revolution that never was
Forty years ago this week, the British rock band Dire Straits released their fifth album Brothers in Arms, a glossily-produced rock masterpiece. But the album's music would arguably become its second most important cultural legacy. Brothers in Arms heralded the start of the Compact Disc revolution, kick-starting a quarter-century-long boom for the music industry and introducing five-inch silver discs into homes around the world.
Brothers in Arms, released on May 17 1985, became the first ever album to sell over a million copies on CD. It spawned five hit singles including Money for Nothing, spent 14 weeks at number one in the UK – and nine in the US – and won a Grammy. In a metaphorical 1980s time capsule, the sky-blue CD case with image of Mark Knopfler's National Resonator guitar nestles alongside a Rubik's Cube, a pair of shoulder pads, a 'Frankie Says Relax' t-shirt and a Filofax as a signifier of the decade. 'Huge,' was how Knopfler recently described the album's impact.
Brothers in Arms was everywhere. At school as an 11-year-old boy, we had a craze for jumping off desks and walls at the moment that Money for Nothing's crunching guitar riff interrupted the song's cascading drums. It was a track we loved because Sting was on it, singing 'I want my MTV' to the tune of The Police's Don't Stand So Close to Me. The song's video featured cool computer graphics and, again, lots of references to the nascent MTV. It all felt shiny and new. But not half as shiny and new as the medium on which most people bought it.
CDs arrived in the UK in 1983 having been jointly developed by Sony in Japan and Philips in Holland. The discs worked by storing music as digital data (encoded as ones and zeroes) in tiny pits arranged in a spiral, as on a vinyl record, beneath a smooth plastic surface. This data was translated back into music by a laser within the CD player as the disc spun. It was speculated that the running length of a CD was made to match the duration of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony (74 minutes) as this was the favourite music of then-Sony chairman Norio Ohga.
Promises came thick and fast. We were told that CDs had huge advantages over vinyl (which scratched or jumped) and cassette tapes (which tangled or snapped). CDs allowed for a greater so-called dynamic range – the difference between the lowest and highest volume within a recording – than analogue vinyl, and they had crisper sound that could include any noise audible to the human ear.
While records and cassettes would degrade after repeated listens, CDs would last forever, went the, er, spin: you could pickle a CD in a vat of Quatro and it would still work. The discs were small, neat and portable, and listeners could skip through tracks at the touch of a button. Very sci-fi.
The world was intrigued, with CDs' apparent indestructibility proving a novelty. An 1981 episode of BBC science programme Tomorrow's World showed presenter Kieran Prendiville scratch a CD with a stone before playing it. (Prendiville wasn't overly convinced, saying it 'remains to be seen' whether there's 'a market for this kind of disc'.) Two years later, on the day that CDs were officially launched, Frank Bough introduced a segment on BBC Breakfast Time in which a CD was smeared in honey and doused with coffee. It still played.
Brian McLaughlin was man responsible for introducing CDs to UK shoppers. In 1983 he was operations director of HMV with sole responsibility for launching the new format in the music chain's stores. 'The industry was in need of a boost, and when I first saw the CD I knew instinctively this could provide the answer,' McLaughlin, 75, tells me. 'It was much smaller than the LP and it was definitely sexier to look at. In my opinion the sound quality was superior. On the downside, because of its size, the sleeve notes, much loved by the LP-buyer, would be sacrificed.'
Still, things got off to a slow start as record labels were unsure of CDs' potential. In 1983 just 250,000 discs were bought in the UK. Then along came Knopfler. 'The Dire Straits album Brothers in Arms just took off in 1985 and the huge sales encouraged all the major [labels] to release new product on CD as well as the album format,' says McLaughlin. In 1985 sales rose to 3.1 million. The following year, the first ever edition of Q magazine came with a booklet naming the best 100 records to buy. By then, 10,000 titles were available. Sales in 1986 hit 8.4 million. Change had arrived. In 2000, CD sales topped 200 million.
It was entirely fitting that Dire Straits were at the vanguard: not only was Brothers in Arms one of the first albums recorded on a digital tape machine (in AIR Studios on the Caribbean island of Montserrat, where Sting happened to be holidaying, hence his involvement) but the album's sound seemed to chime with this new format. Both were slick and luxuriant, both spoke of aspiration and taste. Brothers in Arms became the go-to 'test' CD in stereo shops: the hi-fi equivalent of Deep Purple's Smoke on the Water in guitar shops.
McLaughlin reveals a comedic side issue to the CD's invention: packaging wars. The five-square-inch size of a CD's case was not compatible with the 12-square-inch size of the album display racks in record shops. And penny-pinching US music retailers were unwilling to invest in costly new shelving systems for this upstart new format. So the American record industry invented a thing called a 'longbox' to house CDs.
Longboxes measured six by 12 inches, meaning that two could sit side-by-side in pre-existing vinyl racks. Each box contained one CD and a lot of air. 'It looked hideous,' says the former HMV man, who refused to countenance longboxes in the UK.
Hideous… and ludicrous too. What the US industry saved on new shelves it spent on cardboard. David Byrne released his 1992 album Uh-Oh with a sticker saying 'This is garbage', referring not to his own music but to the wasteful expanse of packaging surrounding it. Peter Gabriel refused to use longboxes. Others took the micky. Joke heavy metal band Spinal Tap released their 1992 album Break Like The Wind in what they called an 'extra-long box' measuring 18 inches tall, which was both a phallic dig at the music industry's ridiculousness and a clever way of making their album stand out from the crowd.
Political indie janglers REM used the excess cardboard on the CD version of 1991's Out of Time to house a petition about voter registration. Some 10,000 fans signed theirs and sent them to the US Congress. (Longboxes were phased out in the US in 1993.)
Over here, HMV demanded that CDs were displayed in their original, smaller packaging. The chain even invested £500,000 in new shelves, an investment it 'never regretted' says McLaughlin, who has written a book called His Master's Voice: The Man Who Changed the Face of Music Retail.
But as we all know, many of the CD's promised advantages were illusory. They scratched easily. And the honey thing was hokum. I vividly remember smearing Duran Duran's hits compilation Decade with a blob of jam to see if it still worked. It skipped for evermore (although the glitches occurred during the godawful Skin Trade. Every cloud). CDs were also hugely expensive. They cost £10 back in 1983 (£33 in today's money).
In 1993 MPs launched a probe into whether CDs were too expensive. The Select Committee for Culture and Sport decided that the record industry was profiteering and referred the case to the higher Consumer Affairs Committee for investigation. The committee found no evidence of profiteering. Yet I'm still staggered when I recall paying £16.49 for a CD of Hole's Celebrity Skin in 1998. That's £31 today, equivalent to a three month subscription to Spotify, which allows unlimited access to practically every song ever written. Were CDs a rip-off or has music become grossly devalued in recent years? Somewhere in between? Answers on a longbox.
'The long and short of it is that although CDs were far more expensive than LPs, the public wanted to have the new technology with its superior sound. This led to over 25 years of uninterrupted growth in music sales in the UK alone,' says McLaughlin.
Record labels cashed in, rushing out 'remastered' versions of classic albums, many of which were dubbed from old master recordings and sounded awful. Morrissey compared CDs to gimmicky household product Shake n' Vac according to Bob Stanley's book Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!. Then the so-called 'loudness wars' broke out. Rather than take advantage of CDs' wide dynamic range, engineers would eschew subtlety and simply make everything as loud as possible. All the instruments, in Spinal Tap parlance, were turned up to 11. Oasis, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Metallica were prominent offenders.
Things didn't last. The CD's decline was as precipitous as its rise. From peak sales in 2000 – when almost a billion CDs were sold in the bellwether US market – the format almost halved in popularity by 2007, hammered by the next wave of technological progress: digital downloads, illegal fire sharing and, later, streaming. Fans moved on. Last year, just 11 million CDs were sold in the UK.
But let's not be totally dismissive of the CD. It fared way better than other 'ground-breaking' formats like the eight-track cartridge, the L-cassette, quadrophonic records (one record, four audio channels, required special kit, popular in the 1970s) and minidiscs.
Besides, there are signs of life in this most hardy of formats. Despite the relatively low numbers, there has been 'retro bounce' in CD sales in recent years as music fans have turned their back on digital music to embrace old physical formats. CD sales rose for the first time in two decades in 2023, according to trade body the Entertainment Retailers Association (with Take That's This Life being the biggest seller). The CD still accounts for around seven per cent of the industry's recorded music income, says the BPI.
So, scarecrows rejoice, we shouldn't give up on the little plastic discs quite yet. Dire Straits' legacy lives on. Just avoid the jam.
The 10 CDs that are still worth owning
1. Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon (1973)
Already the audiophiles' favourite, the best CD versions of Pink Floyd's prog rock opus are the Japanese versions pressed in 1983 or 1984. These were produced at one of the first CD pressing plants in the world in Japan's Shizuoka region, and the sound quality is exceptional.
2. Björk, Homogenic (1997)
An album on which Björk sings about the 'emotional landscapes' of her native Iceland, Homogenic is bold, weird and cinematic – and it sounds fantastic. What Hi-Fi? reviewer Harry McKerrell still uses it as his test record when trying out new hi-fis. For me, the original CD version remains unbeatable.
3. Wu-Tang Clan, Once Upon a Time in Shaolin (2015)
Good luck getting your hands on this one. Only one copy of this CD was created by the Staten Island rap collective, and it was bought directly from the band for $2 million by pharmaceuticals boss Martin Shkreli, who was later jailed for securities fraud. The courts seized Shkreli's assets and the album was sold on to a group of non-fungible token collectors.
4. Michael Jackson, Thriller (1982)
The crispest CD version of Jackson's classic album is the 2001 remaster, released on the superior Super Audio CD format that was introduced in 1999. Remastering was done by legendary audio engineer Bernie Grundman – who mastered Steely Dan's Aja – under the auspices of original Thriller producer Quincy Jones.
5. Miles Davis, Kind of Blue (1959)
Recorded for a few thousand dollars on three-track magnetic tape over just nine hours, Kind of Blue is a jazz gem. Released in 2009, this 50 th anniversary Legacy Edition was remastered by Grammy-winner Mark Wilder. The sound is so bright it could have been recorded yesterday.
6. Tears for Fears, The Seeds of Love (1989)
Massive production, a million pound budget, eight-minute songs, heavy Beatles influences… Tears for Fears' third album encapsulated peak late-1980s excess. But the sound is stunning. I'm told that the Oleta Adams-featuring Woman in Chains is used to this day by battle-hardened sound engineers to test PA systems in massive stadiums because it ticks all the sonic boxes.
7. AC/DC, Early Australian CDs (1985-88)
The Aussie rockers' albums were first released on CD in their homeland in the mid-to-late 1980s on the Alberts record label. These versions presented the album tracks as the band intended – i.e. before their international labels meddled with the running orders. They're now rare and expensive (£60 on eBay).
8. Daft Punk, Random Access Memories (2013)
Beautifully mixed, with fat bass yet crystal clear sound and a phenomenal groove, this final album by the French dance music duo was made for the CD format. Recorded (using real instruments) both digitally and onto analogue tape, the final mix melded the clarity of digital with the warmth of analogue.
9. Runner, Falling Hearts (1991)
This album by Chicago heavy metal band Runner was only initially released in Korea. Although it was reissued in 2022 on CD, original copies of the Korean CD are extremely rare. A collector recently paid $3,000 for a copy, according to Discogs.
10. Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Welcome to the Pleasuredome (1984)
Frankie's label ZTT released the Liverpudlians' album in a dizzying array of CD versions, with different tracks, mixes and running orders. Some CDs have no Ferry Across the Mersey but a nine-minute mix of Two Tribes, others don't. I'd buy the version with Ferry and Do You Know the Way to San José.
