Field NOTES #005: compact risks

GRAILS doesn’t sell CDs.

This occasionally requires an explanation.

We sell records, obviously. We sell cassettes. There’s apparel, books, and enough music-adjacent merch scattered around the shop that the absence of one of the most successful recording formats ever devised can appear conspicuous.

Firstly, allow me to plainly state that vinyl is not a perfect medium. The format imposes physical limitations that digital recordings do not. Bass and playing time are hefty considerations. A poorly cut record can sound considerably worse than a well-mastered CD, and much of the music pressed to vinyl today began its life as a collection of ones and zeroes anyway. A critically acclaimed project is as likely to leap from a dorm-room laptop to a SoundCloud account as it is to be recorded at Electric Lady. Anyone insisting that vinyl is categorically more faithful to an artist’s original recording is making an argument the science doesn’t support.

Fortunately, that’s not at all how I’ve arrived at my decision not to sell compact discs. Sound is only part of what makes an album an album.

Of the formats we’ve devised to sell recorded music, the LP remains its most complete physical expression. Twelve inches gave artists and designers room to make an argument before the needle ever touched the groove. Typography and photography were critical decisions. Liner notes, credits, inner sleeves, inserts, sequencing, even the interruption required to turn the record over became part of the encounter. Behind all of it sat another chain of decisions: mastering, lacquer cutting, plating, pressing. By the time an LP reached a consumer’s hands, an extraordinary number of people had participated in translating recorded sound into an object.

The CD preserved much of that, but shrank it to five inches. More importantly, it lowered the cost of producing the object without anything approaching a proportional reduction in what consumers were asked to pay for it.

That part tends to disappear beneath all the nostalgia. When compact discs first arrived, their expense could reasonably be attributed to new technology. Manufacturing capacity was limited, equipment was expensive, and economies of scale had yet to materialize. As the format matured, however, production costs fell dramatically without producing a comparable reduction at the cash register. By the early 1990s, CDs could cost well under a dollar to manufacture in sufficient volume while consumers routinely paid well into the teens for the finished album.

Artists had considerably more reason to pay attention to the arithmetic. Recording contracts varied enormously, but CDs could be subjected to deductions specifically justified by the format itself. Packaging deductions reduced the royalty base, while so-called “new technology” provisions could reduce it further. A cheaper object therefore did not necessarily mean a cheaper album for the person buying it, nor did the savings necessarily accrue proportionately to the person whose name appeared on its cover.

This is where my objection to the compact disc begins to extend beyond aesthetics. Record companies had found a format that became increasingly inexpensive to manufacture, could be sold at a healthy premium, and gave them the enviable opportunity to resell enormous portions of their existing catalogs to people who already owned the music.

And buy it again we did.

The CD was hardly a confidence scheme disguised as a drink coaster. It was an impressive piece of technology that offered genuine advantages. CDs were smaller and considerably more portable than LPs, with longer playing times, negligible surface noise, and immediate track selection. They were particularly useful for classical music and became extraordinary vehicles for archival releases, box sets, reissues, and recordings that might otherwise have remained prohibitively scarce.

People had perfectly good reasons for liking CDs. Entire record collections were replaced with them. Albums already sitting in millions of homes were purchased again, now promising cleaner sound without the pops, scratches, warps, or indignity of getting off the sofa every twenty-two minutes. Vinyl sections contracted, pressing plants disappeared, and records were hauled into basements, attics, thrift stores, and yard sales with a haste that now seems almost comical.

There is, of course, a cassette rack inside GRAILS, which complicates my righteous indignation somewhat.

Cassettes compromised nearly everything I’ve just spent several paragraphs praising about records. The artwork became tiny. Fidelity suffered. Tape hiss came standard. A sufficiently hungry deck could turn your favorite album into linguine. What cassettes offered in return, however, was unmistakable: portability at a time when recorded music was still largely tethered to the room in which the stereo lived. Just as importantly, cassettes helped foster a subculture in which I, and countless others, embraced our inner Radio Raheem, shouldering a boombox (or, ahem, Ghetto Blaster) through the neighborhood with every intention of fighting the proverbial power.

You cannot put an LP in your pocket, nor can you reasonably play one while walking down the street. Record players react poorly to potholes. Anyone attempting to install a Technics SL-1200 in the dashboard of a Honda Civic has misunderstood both products. The cassette allowed recorded music to leave the living room, whether tucked into a Walkman, stacked in a glove compartment, or rattling around a shoebox hastily packed for a road trip.

The compromise was obvious. You sacrificed some fidelity and ceremony in exchange for mobility. Even the shortcomings occasionally produced something worthwhile. Blank tape transformed the listener into an amateur programmer, capable of recording an album, taping something off the radio, or spending an unreasonable amount of time deciding whether the person they had a crush on would understand what track three on Side B was trying desperately not to say outright.

The cassette never needed to replace the LP at what the LP did best. It had another job.

The compact disc eventually assumed that job, too, but portability alone doesn’t explain why I regard it differently. The more consequential distinction was hiding beneath the reflective surface all along: the music was digital.

For years, this meant relatively little to the average person buying a CD. You inserted the disc into a player, pressed play, and music came out. The ritual remained recognizable enough. There was still an album to purchase, artwork to inspect, a booklet to unfold, and a shelf on which the thing would eventually live. Whatever technological revolution was taking place remained safely contained inside a jewel case.

Then the computer learned what to do with it.

A CD inserted into a computer could emerge as something entirely different. The jewel case remained on the shelf while its contents moved onto a hard drive, an iPod, or eventually a file-sharing network. Recorded music no longer needed to travel with the object manufactured to contain it. The album could be duplicated well enough for ordinary purposes, transported around the world in moments, and accumulated in quantities no bedroom shelving system could reasonably accommodate.

The compact disc did not invent music piracy. It did not invent compression, broadband internet, peer-to-peer networks, or the MP3, and nobody developing the format decades earlier can reasonably be blamed for failing to anticipate Napster, LimeWire, iTunes, or Spotify. Technological history is rarely tidy enough to assign one culprit.

Still, the CD helped normalize a consequential distinction between an album and the object containing it.

Once that distinction became ordinary, the subsequent progression required considerably less imagination. We bought discs and ripped them onto computers. Soon we could purchase the resulting files directly, or download them without purchasing them at all. Eventually, even storing the files began to feel unnecessarily cumbersome. Why fill a hard drive when someone else’s server could hold nearly every recording imaginable?

Streaming was not the inevitable consequence of the compact disc. It was, however, remarkably compatible with the lesson we’d already learned from it: what mattered most was access to the recording. The object surrounding it could eventually be discarded.

Consumers benefited enormously from this progression, which is partly why objections to it can sound hopelessly nostalgic. Music became cheaper to access and almost impossibly easy to find. A teenager with a phone now has immediate access to recordings that collectors once spent decades and considerable sums trying to locate. I run a record store built partly around music that modern technology allowed me to discover long before I ever encountered an original pressing. Pretending otherwise would be ridiculous.

The benefits are real. So are the consequences.

Recorded music has moved from a physical object we owned to something many listeners no longer possess in any meaningful sense. Along the way, the amount of music available to the average listener became nearly infinite while the individual recording became increasingly difficult to value as anything more than another selection awaiting a tap.

That matters to me more than whether I can hear a little surface noise.

It also explains why the current vinyl resurgence leaves me with mixed feelings. Records have returned to department stores, big-box retailers, bedrooms, dorm rooms, and social-media feeds, but not necessarily for the same reasons they once occupied nearly every home stereo. For some listeners, vinyl represents a genuine return to physical engagement with music. For others, the record is merch: an oversized souvenir available in six colors, sometimes purchased without any particular urgency to own the equipment required to hear it. Scarcity and speculative resale values have further complicated the proposition. An object whose survival I celebrate can still be reduced to something I find considerably less interesting.

Perhaps that’s why the cassette doesn’t bother me and the CD does. The cassette compromised the album because people wanted to take music somewhere the record couldn’t go. The CD arrived promising to improve the album itself and, in many measurable respects, succeeded. What followed was an increasingly efficient separation of recorded music from nearly everything surrounding it, including the requirement that we own it at all.

I don’t blame the compact disc for everything that followed. That would require ignoring too much history and granting a five-inch piece of polycarbonate considerably more agency than it deserves.

I simply don’t feel compelled to give it shelf space.