For two decades, the CD has been a hardy successor to audiotape and vinyl. Now the music business wants us to shell out for its new high-tech formats, writes Angus Kidman.

Published in The Bulletin, July 9 2002

When the compact disc was introduced to the mass market in 1982, it provided a double income boost to record companies. Not only could consumers be charged a premium price for the higher-quality digital format, many were persuaded to repurchase on CD recordings that they already owned on vinyl.

Savvy executives were soon raiding their back catalogues, and the reissue of well-loved material on CD became as big a part of the music business as signing up new acts. Rival formats didn't disappear -- vinyl records remain ubiquitous on the dance scene; cassettes got a new lease of life from books on tape -- but CD quickly became the only game in town for most music purchasers. In the early 1990s, music manufacturers tried to repeat the format conversion trick.

Initial attempts such as Digital Compact Cassette (DCC) and MiniDisc failed to attract large numbers of buyers, and few commercial recordings using them were issued. Last year, the first albums using two new audio formats, SA-CD and DVDAudio, appeared in Australia. Both use CD-sized discs and promise even higher quality audio than conventional CDs. They will soon be joined by a plethora of new formats, including DataPlay, Blu-Ray (a high-capacity successor to DVD) and flexCD.

Even if it didn't sense more money in new formats, the record industry can't afford to rest on its CD-funded laurels. The booming popularity of CD burners means that it's now as easy for individuals to copy CDs using a home PC as it once was for them to make tapes of their favourite LPs, and the quality is much higher. The rise of internet file-sharing systems also means they can copy music from a much wider range of sources than just friends and neighbours.

While net piracy attracts headlines, bootleg manufacturers of CDs are just as big a problem. Figures from the Inter­national Federation of the Phonographic Industry show that 950 million pirate CDs were sold in 2001. More than half of those came from small-time operators using PCs and CD burners rather than commercial factories. Those numbers provide a powerful incentive for the record ­business to promote new formats, but consumers may be harder to convince.

For the most part, a change in format means spending several hundred dollars on a new player. (Many of the new formats use a CD-shaped disc so that they can play existing CDs, but none can be played themselves in existing CD players.)

One widely touted contender, Data­Play, can store 500MB of information on a disc that's just 32mm wide, allowing a mixture of music, images and data to be stored by con­tent providers and consumers. Portability and multimedia aside, DataPlay's big selling point is that it incorporates support for Secure Digital Music Initiative, a set of stan­dards being developed by record companies to try to make recordings piracy-proof.

Global record labels BMG, EMI and Universal have signed up to issue some albums in DataPlay format. The industry has experimented with adding anti-piracy technology to existing CDs, but the results have been mixed. Protected CDs won't play on many PCs or in-car players, leading to threats of consumer boycotts. At least one anti-piracy technology can be defeated simply by drawing on the CD with a felt-tip pen, and any audio format can easily be overridden by connecting a cable from the player's headphone socket to a separate recording device.

A more unusual alternative is the flexCD, developed by German researchers over the past five years. The flexCD mimics the existing CD format, but instead of using a hard optical disc, it records information on a polyester foil that is just 140 microns thick (about a 10th of the thickness of a CD). The disc is played back by placing it in a special plastic adapter before inserting it into a CD player.

FlexCD's developers anticipate that it will be used for promotional items; it is robust enough to be included in a packet of crisps, for example, and could prove a sensible alternative for magazine cover discs. However, it might also become a new option for distributing music at low cost, and could even herald the return of the single, a music format that has all but disappeared in many markets during the CD era.