Ohhh brings back memories of seeing Vanilla Ice live and the soooo cute pole dancing guy 
Mmmmm pole dancing guy Yum
That might have been a “bootleg” version. I purchased the Beatles CD’s on the first day they were released to stores. It was several years after the introduction of the CD that the Beatles Albums were re-released. Many early CD magazines mentioned Beatles Albums as being one of the most eagerly awaited releases. When the Beatles albums were finally “officially” released, they were in chronological order over a period of several months. So Sgt. Pepper wouldn’t have been the first even for Beatles albums.
Does anyone know what those CDs cost back then, adjusted for inflation?
Forget gas prices, I want to see what happened to CD prices over the years. I guarantee you they have not gone down.
The History Of The Compact Disc ABBA The Visitors was the first CD album pressed for general public sales.
What I remember was the Dire Straits Brother’s in Arms album was the first CD that was “DDD”. Back then CDs would have a 3-letter code on them specifying how it was recorded. Most CDs were AAD, which meant Analog recording, Analog mastering, Digital media.
So Brother’s in arms had the microphones connected to analog-digital converters and the sound was stored digitally. Those tracks were then mastered digitally (big $$$ in those days), before being put on digital media (CD).
I see this is a zombie, but wouldn’t the first music CD released likely have been a classical piece? To appeal to upscale, rich, early-adopting audiophiles? I remember when CDs first appeared in, gasp*!*, record stores and in the beginning the Classical section by far had the biggest selection.
My guess would be a recording of Beethoven’s Ninth, possibly released in Japan. It’s the length of that symphony that originally determined the capacity (over an hour) of the CD medium. Long classical pieces were very popular in the first CDs, since it was the first time these pieces could be heard without interruption.
And, coincidentally, that was the very first CD that I ever purchased.
Yes, I also have a copy of Beethoven’s 9th (Japanese release, I think). It’s so antiquated, it has sub-tracks too. I bought that, and “Born in the USA”, in mid-1985 before I even had a CD player. Then, later in the year, Radio Shack’s CD player was marked down from $699 to $399 and I went out and bought one. The store I first saw CD’s for sale in Toronto had the Led Zeppelin album with Stairway to Heaven (IV?) prominently displayed, around 1984 sometime IIRC.
For some time, Jean Paul Jarre’s electronic music was widely available - the reason I heard was he had signed for a $1/disc royalty deal instead of the industry standard $5. As a result, the record company pushed his CDs (without discounting them) Once that agreement expired, his discs were much less available.
I also bought a disc of Beethoven piano music with DDD recording - a friend was so impressed when he heard it, he went out and bought a CD player. You could hear the squeak of the piano pedals as the pianist played. Perfectly clear, no rumble or hiss…
In case the zombies care, prices in Canada were typically $23 to $27 per CD, IIRC that translated to US prices in the $19 range.
I learned fairly quickly that you pretty much had to buy DDD classical recordings. I bought a couple non-full digital classical CDs from a record store’s bargain bin, and found out why they were there. Once you heard any classical piece recorded digitally, anything analog sounded like total crap*!* The first DDD copy of Beethoven’s Ninth I bought you could actually hear the occasional ‘cough’ in the audience. And for classical, that’s not a bad thing (in my mind at least, because I always think of classical as being played live). And especially with Beethoven’s Ninth, because then you always get to hear the thunderous applause when it finishes** 
Well, I learned that DDD is no guarantee of audio quality. A fully digital recording made with crappy mikes in a room with crappy acoustics with windows that open onto a busy highway isn’t going to sound great no matter how digital it is. While a good, state-of-the-art-at-the-time analog recording, skillfully remastered (which wasn’t done as much in the early days of CDs), sounds pretty good. But yeah, I got “burned” a time or two before I learned not to assume that “on CD” automatically meant “pristine digital sound.”
But this is was not occurring in 82. That was 85, because Knopfler wanted you to be able hear the drummers sticks whirring in the air. Knopler set up a basic digital only recording studio …
In 82, what was occuring was Billy Joel 's 52ND street album, analog recording sampled to CD, was released to the Japanese market as a CD… Thus being first album to released on CD at FIRST.
Springsteen then MAKES his CD in USA,so as to be first USA released album in a similar definition.
Yeah, but back in the 80s and 90s if you could afford ‘that first D’, in other words an actual digital recording studio, you wouldn’t have skimped on everything else. Nowadays digital has been the standard seemingly forever. I also seem to remember reading back then that the whole three letter A and D code was never an official, regulated standard, so musical discs could vary. The middle letter, the mastering, was what was sometimes ‘open to interpretation’. The first letter was the original source tapes, which had to have been recorded either digital or analog. The last D was actually redundant, as compact discs could only ever be authored digitally…
My memory is notoriously poor, but I seem to recall that there was a rights problem in releasing the Beatles’ albums on CD in the US. We have a copy of a Beatles disk on CD (I think Abbey Road, but I’d have to check) released much earlier in Japan. Most of the text on the CS case and insert are in Japanese.
I remember this too. I recall that the surviving Beatles were concerned about the poor quality of the classic rock stuff first being released on CDs. Before Led Zeppelin released their box set (one of many they eventually released) I bought their individual albums first issued on CD and they didn’t sound very good. In fact because of this many might recall early CDs containing older material used to contain the disclaimer to the effect of:
"…blah blah the digital authoring process may reveal limitations of the source tape…"
And they sure did*!* Tape hiss used to be obnoxiously prominent on those early discs at anything but low volumes. The Beatles were one of the few classic rock bands that had the legal control (and the financial resources) to withhold their catalog’s release on CD until a proper remastering could be done. Also, on some of The Beatles early stuff the stereo separation is glaring (sometimes to the point of all the vocals being on the left channel and all the instruments on the right*!*)