When was minidisc released

We have labels from across the World taking part in International MiniDisc Day and manufacturing and other costs may vary. Prices will be set by the Labels themselves, so follow them on social media for more information and to stay up to date with any special variants or offers they may be doing on the day.

The quantities available will be set by labels themselves — and there may be all manner of reasons why the quantity will be different from one release to the next. The best bet is to follow the labels you are most interested in online, and to bookmark the releases which catch your imagination in order to have the best possible opportunity to grab a copy! We are working to ensure that as many Record Stores as possible are aware of the titles available.

However, the best way to make sure your local store stocks MiniDiscs is to tag them in posts about the day — or to pop in and make them aware that there is local interest. Like Cassette Store Day, and Record Store Day before that, we have to start from scratch — but from the tiniest seeds can grow the most beautiful trees.

When using social media to post about MiniDiscs, or the day itself, please use the hashtag MiniDiscDay! A total of 54 official releases will be dropping on March 7th, as we celebrate the MiniDisc revival for the first time. March 7 marks the first ever International MiniDisc Day. It seems as if they believed pure marketing generates sales and did not realize that perhaps the American consumer electronics market was not ready for MD technology, as we will see.

After the aforementioned massive marketing pushes, the public should have been at least aware of the MD format, but surprisingly this result did not occur. According to the Arizona Star , Sony Electronics research found that by "almost 75 percent of American adults were not aware of the format. The prices of the models were much lower than the first-generation models in Sony hoped that these lower prices would be more amenable to the American market, and indeed, sales increased probably due to its affordability.

Viken extrapolated that the difference between US and Japanese listeners is that "the US market is a bit more sensitive to price points.

Sony concedes that it may take another five to eight years for MD prices to become affordable to the mass public. However, they may still be unaware of more fundamental reasons why the American consumer is unreceptive to MD technology.

Before continuing, it is important to realize that no single one of the following explanations is sufficient to justify the poor sales of MDs in the United States. They may all be necessary, but they are not all sufficient. For example, after examining the Japanese market, the most compelling argument is that since the American market lacks the "high CD price effect" found in Japan CDs are affordable here , MDs would not offer a convenient solution to the popular CD-cassette standard as they did in Japan.

In other words, no "solution" would be necessary because there is no problem - CDs are affordable here. However, if we suppose that the United States has the "high CD price effect" and CD rental stores found in Japan, we could not immediately assume that MDs would sell here.

Indeed, there are several economic and social factors that prevent MDs from becoming mainstream, even with a hypothetical "high CD price effect. First, it is interesting to notice that the American consumer market is not an active early adopter market as seen in Japan. Professor Richard Dasher conjectured that the active early adopter market in Japan exists because of a large amount of disposable income among Japanese consumers. As described in the Popular Mechanics article referenced earlier, Americans probably have less disposable income to spend on gadgets because they purchase more real estate and larger products for the home.

Therefore, one can assume that American consumers are, with less disposable income, more impressed by real improvements in new technology instead of novelty or wow-factor. In order to become mainstream, MDs would have to offer a certain affordable improvement over the CD-cassette standard already entrenched in our society. For example, the CD became so popular after its introduction in because it offered a worthwhile improvement over vinyl records.

A article in The Economist describes this requirement:. Since the success of CDs venture capitalists have introduced a rule of thumb known as the 10X rule to help them decide which ventures to back. Although the 10X rule is alarmingly subjective, it serves as a useful guide when considering the performance of a new technology. Although DAT was better than CDs because it could record and better than tapes because of improved sound quality, it was not worth the upheaval of changing over from CDs and cassettes.

In other words, the low prices from the established network effects between producers and consumers of CDs and cassettes were much more appealing than a slightly better product.

Therefore, DAT failed in the mass market. Unfortunately for Sony, MD was introduced and marketed at a time when numerous other audio formats were being introduced. This situation led to consumer confusion and ultimately to apathy and wariness of any new audio technology.

So before proving that MD is 10 times better than the widely used audio cassette, Sony had to prove that MD was superior to the other new audio formats. Only then would consumers consider a pure MD versus audio cassette comparison. As we will see, Sony would have a rough time proving MD's superiority because all of these formats have comparable advantages. First we will compare MD to the new audio formats, then we will return to the more fundamental question of why is it so difficult to replace the audio cassette with MD or any new format for that matter.

It is no wonder then that American consumers kept their cash in their wallets and stayed put until the "winner" of the next audio format war became apparent. At the time, the market for DAT was already becoming restricted to the high-end audio folks like new artists and artist-wannabees for making master demo tapes to send to the record companies. It was a dud in the mass market. Consequently, there was a lot of speculation over an upcoming market battle between mini-disk and the Philips standard for digital audio cassette.

People were expecting Beta versus VHS all over again. Philips and Matsushita bet on the fact that DCC players are "backward compatible," that is they can also play regular analog tapes that are everywhere. However, DCC does have its disadvantages compared to MD: DCC lacks instant track access - one has to wait while the machine rewinds or fast-forwards - and DCC has spools and tape, which can wear and break over time.

As described earlier, MDs have instant track access and are much more durable because there are no moving parts. It was billed as the biggest bloodiest fight-of-the-formats since the video-cassette recorder duel between Betamax and VHS. But it wasn't. The two did not lay a glove on each other.

Instead both were floored by existing technologies [i. Indeed, neither format won. Both technologies seemed to fail the 10X rule in America because their features were not compelling enough and they did not offer substantially higher sound quality over CDs.

Philips and Matsushita, disappointed with sales and realizing that tapes were becoming low-tech, soon dropped DCC altogether.

Since it is beyond the scope of this paper to investigate the details of each format, it is enough to examine why each format would cause a consumer to think twice when considering an investment in MD technology. Although the mass market would normally avoid such extra hassles, CD-Rs have become popular simply because CD players are ubiquitous. Audiophiles burn personally mixed CD-Rs with their computers and can play the discs anywhere. However, unlike MDs, once a CD-R is made, it cannot be altered; for example, if you want a different song on track 7, you would have to start all over and burn another CD-R - the first CD-R you made would go to waste.

This confusion may frustrate some consumers who decide to invest in CD-RWs, believing that they get the best of both CD-R's knowing you can play them anywhere and MDs re-recordability.

Therefore, all that CD-RW technology does is add to audio consumer confusion. MP3 players such as the Diamond Rio or Creative Nomad have burst onto the portable audio market a few years ago. The biggest advantage of an MP3 player over MD is its solid-state technology. With no moving parts, the result is lengthy playback time 12 hours with one AA battery , incredibly small size smaller than a deck of cards , quick transfer rate copying from your computer to MP3 player takes a few minutes and almost infinite shock-resistance it will never skip.

However, there is a downside to MP3 players' solid-state technology: since the music is stored on pricey flash RAM, you cannot feasibly carry around extra flash RAM if you get tired of the same 14 or 15 songs that fit on a 64 megabyte player. Thus, the choice between MP3 player or MD player depends on the type of user.

Short-duration users such as commuters should use the smaller MP3 player while long-duration users such as joggers should use MDs for variety.

Although most of us are familiar with DVD movies, we are not aware that their goal is to "provide a single format for the audio-visual market, so eventually it will be possible to have one machine for video, hi-fi, and multimedia. With that much more information, DVD Audio can have a wider frequency range than CD, giving a fuller and deeper sound. Indeed, of all the technologies discussed thus far, DVD Audio is the only one to offer an improvement in sound quality.

The next few years will be exciting for the portable audio market as all of these technologies become affordable. Although the Sony Walkman was undeniably successful from its launch in , we easily forget how such a widespread product can affect our daily lives. Paul Kunkel explains in Digital Dreams :. The culture of design and the impact that designers and their works have on society at large may be difficult to comprehend because these designed objects are so prevalent in our day-to-day existence.

Most people living in industrialized society are in contact with designed objects every moment of their lives. Indeed, the Sony Walkman has pervaded not only American culture, but the cultures of most industrialized countries. The Smithsonian Institution recognized this phenomenon in by accepting the Walkman as a cultural icon.

Considering that Walkman owners must have cassettes to play music, it is safe to assume that audio cassettes are everywhere as well. As late as pre-recorded cassette sales in the United States were comparable to CD sales: million cassettes to million CDs. However, in Japan the prevalence of cassettes were already fading. In , a mere 45 million cassettes were sold while million CDs were sold. The United States followed suit with declining cassette sales: in , cassettes accounted for According to this general decline in cassette sales, Mark Viken states that "people are just dissatisfied with audiocassette" because of "the sound quality versus what they're used to with digital.

Digital may be better, but it comes at a cost that the average consumer would not pay. Matthew Simmons, Samsung's marketing manager, describes this sentiment: "The problem is that many people are quite happy to record their CDs on to a cheap tape and take it outside. It does not matter if they drop the tape or get sand in it, it's cheap enough to be almost disposable. The new systems are just too expensive for such treatment.

As an example of public discontent at the continual introduction of new, incompatible technologies, one journalist from the Los Angeles Times harshly criticizes the push for MD to replace cassettes:. These new products represent a form of planned obsolescence for existing equipment. Now that the market for cassette and CD players is saturated, the manufacturers refuse to accept the resulting decline in sales. Instead, they will ask us to abandon music collections accumulated over many years for existing equipment and buy new, incompatible equipment.

Overall, it seems that cassettes will be around for a while because pure economies of scale accumulated as the Walkman industry boomed in the s resulted in extremely cheap blank tape prices. Although prices may be most important to the consumer, cassettes probably hold a cultural and nostalgic meaning to Americans as well.

In short, Sony's difficulties in selling the MD Walkman are probably a result of its own incredible success with the cassette Walkman. Journalist Alan Goldstein of the St. The powerful recording industry gets its way. Sony's manufacturers complained because the special circuit increased the overall price of each unit premiums go to the record companies as copyright compensation , but the RIAA had gotten its way. So when Sony introduced the MD in , it avoided a similar fate by creating an incompatibility within different MD discs.

The seriousness of such an incompatibility raised more than a few eyebrows. Therefore, MD had an even smaller chance of competing against cassettes as the new recording format. At this point, it is important to ask how record companies in Japan affected MD development. However, as noted before with the failed attempt to shut down CD rental stores, the record companies in Japan do not seem to have much influence in the government.

Instead, as Professor Richard Dasher explains: "It's also possible that the Japanese record industry was waiting to see how the US music industry, whose lobbying power was generally looked on with awe in Japan, would react.

As we have seen before, the establishment of demand for popular singles in Japan "software" led to increased production of MD players "hardware". You can opt to delay a shipment and send multiple items at once, too.

Since many Japanese sellers are uncomfortable shipping abroad, intermediaries are a necessity. So, why go to all this effort for MiniDisc? For some, it might be the nostalgia of using a physical medium. Others might still be reluctant to use streaming services. Some people just hate having to use their phone for every task. MiniDiscs are still a good option for car audio, offline listening in the wilderness, or even creating your own physical recordings.

Some artists still release music on MiniDisc. Many vaporwave artists, in particular, have embraced MiniDisc since that genre meshes perfectly with the rose-tinted nostalgia that draws so many to the format. Got a soft spot for antique audio formats? After you order your MiniDisc, find yourself a turntable and get started on that vinyl collection. Browse All iPhone Articles Browse All Mac Articles Do I need one? Browse All Android Articles Browse All Smart Home Articles Customize the Taskbar in Windows Browse All Microsoft Office Articles What Is svchost.

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